Friday, June 19, 2009

Prestigious Painter Award


An exhibit of the work of the eight finalists in the annual Bethesda Painting Awards competition is on view at the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda. The winners of the generous awards, funded by the Trawick Foundation, were announced at the opening.

As in the past, the competition was released to artists of all levels from Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Of the record 240-plus submissions received, 38 were chosen as semi-finalists. The jurors included John Winslow, painter and Catholic University emeritus professor, whose proclivities are literally evident in the selection of finalists. The other two jurors, also painting professors, were Patrice Kehoe, University of Maryland, and Ruth Bolduan, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Perhaps most interesting about the results of the judging is the relative homogeneity of the selections, with one glaring exception. On one hand is a group of abstract works, all of them relating linear patterning and layering of forms. The rest are realists, except for the top prize winner, Camilo Sanin, who works in a style that might be called Neo-Color Field. Sanin's striped paintings are redolent of the work of 1960s Washington Color Field painters Gene Davis and Howard Mehring, but on a much smaller scale.

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