current Exhibition
- Upcoming Art Exhibition in the Gavilan College Library Art Gallery (Gilroy Campus):
Spring 2024 Semester Exhibition Featured Artist: Ian Pines
The next art show for Ian Pines will be installed in the Gavilan College Library Building Art Gallery (Gilroy Campus) in late March 2024.
Painting and teaching keeps abstract artist Ian Pines extremely busy most days.
“My paintings are brutishly personal, intuitive, and psychological,” he explains. “They are rapidly metamorphosing mirrors of primordial oil. Yet out of the glut of paint on canvas emerges much that contains artistic, anthropological, and cosmological significance.”
Pines has taught painting, drawing, design, color and art theory at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo since 2017. He also has instructed creative disciplines, ranging from digital photography to sculpture, at numerous educational institutions across the state. His small and large canvases have been widely exhibited in California and New Mexico.
Laboring with abstraction, Pines employs compounded expressionistic brushstrokes. He continually churns up and reuses his paint, working and reworking the painting surface.
“Most of my most successful paintings have required not giving up on them after months or years of work. When it seems completely hopeless, I will usually introduce some seemingly rash and large-scale application or removal of paint that will hopefully result in an unforeseen cohesion in the whole image that I can work with.
“I’ve only once given up on a painting. I then cut that canvas up and used sections of it on other works—so not completely giving up on it,” he recalls. “I guess I probably haven’t learned when to give up and when not to.”
The artist explains that with many of his oily excavations, he’s striving to juxtapose and violently merge three elements that work at varying speeds on earth -- the slow geologic element of rocks and minerals (rocky, eroded, and stratified surfaces), the animal and human element of relatively primal existence (fleshy pinks and reds), and the technological element of quick advancement (metallic surfaces, ores, and inorganic shapes).
“Along with my tenacity and my works’ authenticity, my family and friends have been invaluable in my professional advancement. This advancement was not easy, but I feel very fortunate on multiple levels to be doing what I’m doing.”
Pines earned his Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010.
For more information on the Gavilan College Art Gallery and Future/Current/Past Art Exhibitions, please contact:
John Dorrance: dorrance.communications@gmail.com & 408-427-2543.
John is a local artist and student at Gavilan College. He is currently enrolled in the gallery assistance course at Gavilan and he helps update this art gallery webpage. He writes copy and compiles images for current, past, and future art shows at Gavilan College (Spring Semster 2024).