The Fairfield University Art Museum presents a new exhibition, “Michael Gallagher — Sketching the Landscape: A Plein Air Journal” on view from Friday, April 21 through Friday September 8, 2017, in the museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on the campus of Fairfield University.
An opening reception, free and open to the public, will take place on Sunday, April 23, 2017, from 4-5:30 p.m. in the Great Hall.
In his professional life as one of the world’s foremost paintings conservators, Michael Gallagher has worked on masterpieces by such luminaries of European art as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Poussin, Rubens and Velázquez. Calling on specialized knowledge of materials and techniques used by painters at different moments in history, his sensitive interventions have helped recover the artists’ intentions, revealing luminous surfaces and lost details of panel paintings and canvases that had been compromised by damage and obscured by later overpaint and darkened varnish.
In his private moments, Gallagher has long sketched and painted landscapes—poetic, evocative and light-dappled scenes of rolling hills, sparkling seasides, rocky outcroppings and moody forests. Done in vastly diverging locales in different continents and hemispheres, at different times of day, and in all four seasons, his plein air watercolors and oil sketches capture a nuanced sense of place, at once changing and immutable, undisturbed by human presence. Discretely observed and inflected by a reticent silence, these ruminations on the landscape in its myriad manifestations form a journal of visual responses, chronicled over time.
In conjunction with the exhibition the museum is offering a Family Day, the theme of which is “Sketching the Landscape,” on Saturday, April 22, from 1-4 p.m. (2 sessions). Guests will enjoy arts and crafts activities and a child-friendly gallery tour. Advance registration for this event is required (fuam.eventbrite.com).
A lecture by the artist on his career in paintings conservation is being planned for September. These programs are free and open to the public.