Darren Waterston creates richly layered, sensuous paintings, that encourage the viewer to sit with deep human emotions centered around love, loss and human endurance. The exhibition’s title, Adrift, calls us towards the emotional sensations of being unmoored and untethered. With references to abstracted landscapes, wherein pictorial space is destabilized and ethereal, the works explore the sensory experience of floating outside of the body, representing in-between states of dream and awake. At times terrestrial, marine or celestial, the atmospheres depicted feel humid and thick, enveloping the viewer in a rich cloak of saturated color.
Informed by composers like Claude Debussy, music offers an entryway into Waterston’s painterly abstractions. Musicality permeates the exhibition, with titles such as Partita and Lento, allowing tempo, tenor, and movement to become frameworks to encounter the picture plane. Motion within these mysterious spaces is requisitely slow and processual, reflecting the artist’s measured hand. The material range of substrates offers its own cadence, a crescendo to the mural enveloping us in its swirling terrain.
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The Sea, 2024, oil on wood panel, 72 x 60 inches
Lento, 2024, oil on wood panel, 36 x48 inches
Yesterday's Ascension, 2024, watercolor on rag paper, 32 x 24.5 inches
Next Life no. 2, 2024, watercolor on rag paper, 16 x 12 inches
Portrait of Margery Kempe, 2024, watercolor on rag paper, 13 x 29.5 inches
Returning, 2024, watercolor and acrylic on rag paper, 24 x 18 inches
Dove's Flight, 2024, oil on wood panel, 72 x 60 inches
Reveries no. 3, 2024, oil on wood panel, 12 x 16 inches
Adrift, 2024, oil on wood panel, 48 x 36 inches