Arts Council showing June Tyler’s work

NORWICH - June Tyler’s “Retrospective Exhibition” is now on display in the Mariea Brown and Raymond Loft galleries in Norwich. Tyler won “Best of Show” in the Chenango County Council of the Arts 2004 Members Exhibit, which awarded her with this one-woman show. This high quality fine art exhibit will feature paintings, drawings and prints that Tyler made from 1975 through 2005 with an emphasis of abstract nature themes.  Tyler says of her work “my art-making involves an organic creative process. The cycle often begins with an experience, which is visually and emotionally or spiritually stimulating. I begin to represent what I have seen in a naturalistic manner. Over a period of time, as I examine this experience from a variety of angles through color, light, different materials… what I have seen and experienced is visually transformed.” 

Tyler began experimenting with abstraction from natural forms during her college years at SUNY Potsdam in the mid-1970’s.  She incorporated the ‘doodles’ from her lecture classes with those she observed in nature such as the shapes and colors of a shell.  Prior to moving to graduate school in Madison Wisconsin, she began working with abstractions from human forms.  The painting and prints from this time include oils on canvas and lithographs.  After receiving her M.A. in Graphics and Painting from the University of Wisconsin she took teaching positions in Syracuse and Auburn where her artwork once again returned to nature abstractions.  During the 1980’s she began working with man-made objects that evoked similar feelings as some of the natural forms had.  As with the natural subject matter, she began working representationally with the items and then began to experiment with the colors, lines and forms so they would transform into something else.

In the mid to late 1980’s, she had the opportunity to travel to Europe with her art students and mother.  The architectural ruins were so organic looking that she was inspired to work with that subject.  She could see the organic, cave-like forms of her earlier paintings in the stone arches and vaults of the Roman architecture there.  The textures and colors of the stone in the ancient villages and small Romanesque churches were warm and rich.  She did numerous studies, both realistic and abstract and incorporated these elements into her artwork.