Mimo Gordon Riley
Finding the Light
About the Show:
While painting nature, the time goes by very slowly for me. You don’t know if it’s yesterday, today, or tomorrow, and it doesn’t really matter.
Sometimes I paint nature from observation, but mostly from memory. I grew up way out in the country and was the youngest by five years in my family. I spent a lot of time alone…in the woods, in the fields, by the pond, in the garden. I stored up images, enough to last me a long time.
To me, what matters most is the light… the light that differentiates one part of the painting from the other. The light that butts up against the dark. By surrounding the light, the dark defines it. It’s the dark that makes the light, therefore you can’t see the light without seeing the dark, and that’s what makes the painting come together as a whole.
Mimo Gordon Riley 8/11/23
Granite Gallery
Tenants Harbor Maine
About the artist:
Mimo Gordon Riley does not plan her paintings. Confronting the broad and general subject of the natural world, she draws with a brush instead of a pencil, covering the canvas with layers of color. She then splits up the space with lines or shapes, pushing some colors into the background, pulling others forward, creating something that she connects with viscerally. Once the connection is made, the rest falls into place. She’s been painting nature’s patterns with her own colors for many years, trying to personalize the world around her.
Gordon Riley studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, graduated from the Maine College of Art, and has exhibited throughout New England for the last 30 years, including the Newport and Attleboro Art Museums, Candita Clayton, Art Prov, Providence Art Club, Art League of RI, and Pawtucket Arts Collaborative in southern New England; AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH; and June Fitzpatrick, Caldbeck, Mars Hall, Granite Gallery and Maine Arts Commission in Maine.
She has had a studio for 20 years in Pawtucket, RI, where she is a member of the Mayor’s Commission on Arts and Culture, the % for Public Art Committee, and the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative. She is grateful for Pawtucket’s spirit, its commitment to artists, and to reawakening the city through the arts.
Find out more about Mimo Gordon Riley at mimogordonriley.com.com