Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased
to announce Primary Color, a solo exhibition of drawings by Philip
Carpenter. Primary Colors will be Carpenter’s first solo exhibition
at Marcia Wood Gallery.
The drawings of Philip Carpenter,
at once mundane and compelling, are distilled portraits of ordinary
things. Carpenter, who previously worked in figurative oil portraiture,
states that “ as with other portraiture, the drawings elevate
the status of the objects.” In a sense then, these object
drawings truly are portraits, though of a different sort. Working
exclusively with colored pencil on paper, Carpenter astounds the
viewer with a precise mastery of his medium that is incongruous
with the immediacy that is the first impression the drawings make.
Carpenter has said he works with the colored pencils in some of
the same ways he once worked with oil - subtly blending one color
atop another and "pushing" the color along the surface
of the paper.
In Primary Colors, Philip Carpenter
builds on a recent body of work – previewed as a part of his
solo exhibition, Work and Play, at Hartsfield-Jackson International
Airport earlier this year – that stands as a stunning shift
from the worn and aged, archetypal-seeming hand-tools and work objects
for which he is known, to a focus on the energy and electricity
of the molded-plastic toys and brightly-colored tchochkes that surround
us. In a manner that, in the words of MOCA-GA co-founder and director
Annette Cone-Skelton, “can only be described as more than
or beyond realism,” Carpenter achieves the frenetic energy
and exaggerated emotions that radiate from these figures, and realizes,
as always, the life contained within them.
In addition, Primary Colors contains
many elements which will delight those already familiar with Carpenter’s
work. A series of portraits of plastic toy tools makes subtle reference
to the aged industrial implements Carpenter is known for drawing.
Another series focuses Carpenter’s signature hyper-realism
to a variety of plastic-formed dolls, his faithful rendering of
which simultaneously highlighting the objects’ eerie unreality
to life as well as ironically referencing Carpenter’s own
previous work as a portraitist.
"Philip Carpenter has established
a modus operandi, and in this case a subject matter, to which he
continues to return. Through a masterly manipulation of colored
pencils, [this] Atlanta artist creates icons of everyday life. The
tools that he renders with perfect precision - scissors, a paintbrush,
a wrench - float on an otherwise bare page and take on an almost
holy beauty." [Catherine Fox, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]
Philip Carpenter has exhibited throughout
the southeast since 1975. His most recent exhibition was at Atlanta’s
Hartsfield–Jackson International Airport January–March
2005. Carpenter’s works are in many public and corporate collections,
including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, King &
Spalding, and Auburn University. Carpenter has received fellowships
from The Hambidge Center and The National Endowment for the Arts,
among others.
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