Artist: Dennis Foy“One of the first things that strikes the viewer when looking at a Dennis Foy painting is his reductive and minimalist eye,” says his dealer, Bernard Mazar. “He sees his horizon line as symbolic of the division between spirit and earth, the known and the unknown. Mr. Foy captures the essence of the sky and the water, avoiding the distractions of unimportant and transient details. The paintings are luminous and brightly colored. The artist states that his work is about transition.”
Some of his earlier works created in the 1990’s are somber paintings of Sedona, Arizona. The Sedona paintings are beautiful, meticulous and densely packed, showing every ledge and crevice of mountain terrain. They are painted using golden ochres, umbers and sepia brows and capture the light at the end of the day. Painted with stroke-by-stroke attentiveness, they bring to mind the work of Cezanne. His current coastal paintings reflect a view of modern impressionism, reducing the physical to a meditated spiritual state.
While Foy is largely considered to be a representative landscape painter, abstraction figures prominently in his work. Foy’s primary medium is oil on linen. He also paints on canvas and wooden panel and frequently creates studies for larger painting (sometimes oil on paper) that are fully executed works in their own right. Considering their finish and degree of detail, it comes at no surprise, that the artist typically only creates a dozen or so large and small paintings a year.
His artistic statement examples his astonishment with the process of painting – it is more submission to myth than to knowledge. He states, “I prefer not to interfere with the viewer’s experience by suggesting what should be seen and felt regarding my work. My paintings paint themselves. Regardless of the original drawing, monochromatic under painting, or my intent, somewhere in the process unconscious changes occur that lead each painting in an unanticipated direction. Often, I have no memory of the confrontation, or the image’s progression, or my participation in the process. I do know that in those hours of transition, I have very little control over these developments. It is a bittersweet fait accompli to surrender to paint.”