December 14 - January 11, 2025
From J. Peeler Howell Fine Art:
“In the past decade, my paintings have urged me to reference stewardship more directly, our collective responsibility to the land, the animals, and to each other. My work has always been prompted by a love of nature, its shapes and colors, its movement. My family were farmers, and even those who later moved to towns continued to plant gardens near the house for food. Each year, I make a couple of paintings in honor of earthworms. Fertile soil and healthy crops depend on pollinators above, and excavators below. The paintings in this exhibit are reflections on the symbiotic relationship of humans and animals with earth’s air, land and water. – T.D. Motley The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country I want the reader to have a conversation with Sam Bartlett. Through his eyes, thoughts and actions, the reader can experience the farm, the rural landscape, and neighbors, including animals domestic and wild. I want the reader to be a participant in the action, to be surprised on occasion right along with Sam. I also want to convey a historical connection of the spirit of Bartlett Farm to the ancient respect for agriculture and rural living, as expressed through classical art and literature. I hope readers will embrace this artist/farmer’s affection for family and friends, the animals and crops in his care, and his visceral love of nature. I particularly admire his ironic humor in the face of farm life adversity. Sam Bartlett lives and works in the landscape he paints. – T.D. Motley “In many of Tom’s works, the image is both experienced as topographical (often geometric) from above, as well as intimately, as a fluid organism from below. I believe this comes from the deeply engrained absorption of the land’s instress, in particular the Texas coastline and hill country he grew up with, born to a family of farmers and a father working the oil rigs of the gulf. Both Beaumont and Hill County make their presence materially in Tom’s paintings. The coastlines of the gulf, vaporously wavering between land and water, continuously evaporating in a blurred dance, are sensed in his pouring of paint, which is both liquid and becomes a line; an object. Evident in such works as Medea’s Aegean Holiday and High Tide, the viewer is able to feel the bird’s eye view of the land, but also sense its fluctuation between rigid and fluid through the mastery of Tom’s techniques with paint, as the canvas flickers between structural cartography and poetic ephemera.” – Sara Cardona
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An Evening of Stewardship, Book Signing and Open Reception with T.D. Motley
Please join us at J. Peeler Howell Fine Art on Saturday, December 14th from 5:30pm to 8:00pm for a book signing with T.D. Motley to celebrate the release of his new novel, The Art Of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country. The book signing is united in the spirit of stewardship with the opening of the gallery’s exhibition, Earth Matters: Sun, Moon, Carbon, Water, a selection of paintings by T.D. Motley.”
Reception: December 14, 2024 | 5:30–8 pm
Featuring a book signing for The Art of Farming: Sketches of a Life in the Country by T.D. Motley
3521 Locke Avenue
Fort Worth, 76107 Texas
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