Of the three major works in this exhibition, two were made while McGarrell was the senior Artist-in-Residence at Roswell in the late Winter and Spring of 1999. They are the 15-foot wide triptych painting The Biggest Pantry: Dawn, Noon and Night and the suite of monotype drawings, Indigo Windows. A second blue drawing suite entitled Orbiana Oliveto was created in the same medium while the artist and his wife were Bogliasco Fellows at The Ligurian Study Center for the Arts and Humanities near Genoa Italy in the Spring of 2003. 

Artist's notes: 
   "About the big canvas, before and after the Roswell residency I had been exploring paintings of profusions of food as a kind of metaphor for the art of painting, in its organic richness and varieties of shameless appeal to sensuous engagement. As often in my work, I was also dealing with the passage of time, in this case of course the times of day. I have long been interested in the different ways in which objects of visual art are still, unmoving and yet can evoke rhythm, motion and transformation, concepts which can only happen in the dimension of time. 

The suites of monotype drawings (a medium in which marks on a surface are printed on paper in unique impressions--editions of one, as it were) are both improvisations drawn from imagination, which is of course, simply memory rearranged and articulated. 

   In Indigo Windows the theme is objects, events or phenomena which might be found in front of, in, or on the other side of those openings we insist on making in the walls of our dwellings. Each sheet introduces a new image and works a variation on the one introduced in the previous page. 

Orbiana Oliveto was made after close study of the olive grove outside my studio on the grounds of the Villa Orbiana at Bogliasco and a rereading of Homer's Odyssey.  It was not, however, drawn from direct observation of the former and is not intended as illustration of the latter. The accompanying poems were written for the drawings by the distinguished poet Rosanna Warren."

James McGarrell

The paintings of James McGarrell have been exhibited since 1955 at galleries and museums in America and Europe. They are in the permanent collections of many institutions including the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Art Museums of New Orleans, Saint Louis, Santa Barbara, Hamburg, Germany, the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University and the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia. His work has been included in five Whitney Museum Annuals and Biennials, two Carnegie International Exhibitions, Documenta in Kassel, Germany; and the American Pavilion of the 1968 Venice Biennale. In 1995 McGarrell received the Jimmy Ernst lifetime achievement award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. With his wife, the poet and translator Ann McGarrell, he lives and works in Newbury Vermont. His work is represented in New York by the George Adams Gallery.

Penelope's Dream
monotype drawing
22" x 30" 
2003

Eurymedousa's Fire monotype drawing
22" x 30" 
2003

Kirke's Swine 
monotype drawing
22" x 30" 
2003