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January Issue 2004

I. Pinckney Simons Galleries in both Columbia and Beaufort, SC, Offer Works by Dennis Sheehan

The I. Pinckney Simons Galleries in Columbia, SC, and Beaufort, SC, are featuring works by Dennis Sheehan during the month of Jan., 2004.

A highly accomplished landscape artist, native Bostonian Sheehan paints in the esteemed tradition of American Tonalism, a movement in American art that flourished from about 1880 to 1915 and was considered as a modified and variant form of Impressionism. The artists of the Tonalist movement were concerned with the evocation of reverie and nostalgia as experienced through pure landscape. They wished to transmit "soul" in the landscape and to awaken a sense of spirituality in the viewer through a heightened emotional response. Sheehan is a disciple of George Inness (1825-1894) who was the earliest American Tonalist painter. The work of both Sheehan and Inness is imbued with soft light, blurred forms of foliage, and ambiguous human forms.

Sheehan embraces the philosophy expressed by Inness which is: "A work of art must have subtlety of tone and a certain amount of mystery that can never be seen at first glance. It must be looked at a long time before its subtle tones can be grasped; and if it is great, it grows upon you, and the longer you look, the more you see, and to describe it is almost impossible, because you never see it twice a like. It changes with your mood. It is a thing to live with. You study it; you learn to see the soul of it. It is like a face that becomes beautiful because you have learned to know and love the soul behind it. When a picture gives you this effect, it is great art."

Sheehan received his artistic training at the Vesper George School of Art (1968-71) in Boston, MA, and at the Montserrat School of Visual Art (1971-1972) in Beverly, MA, where he was immersed in the best traditions of the "Boston School" which advocated classic realism. He was a proprietor and instructor in painting at the The Art Studio in Peabody, MA, and a painting instructor at St. Johns Preparatory School in Danvers, MA. Sheehan furthered his study of art by working privately with Robert Cormier, 1989-1990 and Richard Whitney, 1990-1993, both former students of R. H. Ives Gammell, an artist of the early twentieth century who upheld the tradition of the realist painters of the Boston School. Consequently, Sheehan was concerned with meticulous detail and painted in an ultra realistic style during the early stages of his painting career.

Sheehan's style, however, soon changed drastically. As recounted in a recent article devoted to Sheehan "Identifying with the Past" by Lori W. Simons in American Artist (Oct. 2003), upon entering a bookstore in Boston, Sheehan was so amazed by a poster of a landscape painting that he immediately began researching the artist of the painting. The painting was June (1882) and the artist was George Inness. "I started spending more time in museums, libraries, and bookstores, and I began collecting magazine articles and art-auction catalogs on artists such as Corot, Bruce Crane, J. Francis Murphy, Alexander Wyant, and Hugh Bolton Jones," says Sheehan. As a result, Sheehan's mature style has evolved into quiet, moody landscapes with dramatic tonal contrasts. Works such as Wooded Sunset with its fiery orange afterglow and Late October with its rich autumnal burgundies juxtaposed to a bright blue sky testify to the fact that Sheehan's landscapes are far from just being hues of grays and greens. He does employ tonalism which emphasizes dark, neutral hues like gray and brown, but then he goes beyond this with splashes of bright color. In addition to color, there is the issue of light.

Sheehan reflects on the aspect of light in his paintings: "The transitional period of dusk, dawn, and after a storm and even those grayed out days in winter when the sun's light is most effusive, these are the qualities of light that I am most interested in. The mood that the light evokes, the color harmony and the subtleties of tone with less emphasis on detail are of prime concern to me. My goal is to have the painting emanate light, rather than be just a surface that records the reflection of light. This is why the shadow areas are important, for it is from them that this emanation proceeds. The light areas are focal points of this effort, but the power comes from the shadows."

The transmission of light in his paintings comes about through the intriguing reductive method in which Sheehan paints. He begins by covering his canvas with a brownish-green mixture of combined bright greens, brown madder alizarin, and orange-red pigments. While the canvas is still wet, he then removes the dark paint with a paper towel form the areas of the painting which will be lighter such as the sky or water. Sheehan then uses his finger to wipe out the sharper lines for harder elements in the work such as tree trunks and uses a bristle brush in order to draw in the branches of the trees. Lastly, he uses transparent glazes enhanced with pigments of green, blue, pink, and yellow.

Sheehan has this indefinite and mystical gift of tone that makes his paintings glow with amazing luminosity. His landscapes are imagined places waiting to be discovered by the viewer's psyche. Sheehan continues the great tradition of landscape painting while also sustaining the unique American tradition of Tonalism.

Sheehan currently has a studio in Manchester, NH.

For more information, please check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the Columbia gallery at 803/771-8815, the Beaufort gallery at 843/379-4774 or email to (simonsgallery@aol.com).

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