GREENSBORO – An exhibition of paintings by Harold Arthur Drury is currently being held at the Lauredon Place Gallery on 545 Laurendon Avenue, through the end of September.
Harold Arthur Drury was born in Seattle, Wash., in 1926 but spent much of his youth in Australia and New Zealand, where he studied art in Auckland and was much influenced by Maori Museums there. He went to London after World War II where he showed at the Redfern and Tate Galleries and was patronized by Sir Edward Marsh, the private secretary to Winston Churchill.
Receiving grants from the New Zealand Arts Council to study in Paris; he spent the next sixteen years of his life there with his family, at a time when Paris was the center of the art world with a number of exhibitions. Due to the political turmoil in France in 1968, he had to move back to London to further his artistic career while his wife and children went to the United States and settled in Stowe. He rejoined them in 1975 and continued in Stowe until his death in 2003. He showed his work regularly at the Helen Day Arts Center, the Dibden Gallery in Johnson, the Individuals Gallery in New York City and other venues. He tutored private students from his Pond Street studio.
His oeuvre went through six overlapping periods of about ten years each, beginning with his early work of the 1940s, characterized by monster heads, of which few pieces remain. In the 1950s his paintings had banner motifs like in heraldry, systemically structured, while the 1960s could be described as a galactic phase, with speckled textures. A major development in the 1960s and 70s, was works of nude women combined with more abstract shapes. Entirely non-figurative pictures marked the 1980s, while his “Warrior” series joining human and animal heads was typical of the 1990s.
This exhibition gives a sampling of the spectrum of his life’s work, but there are many other of his paintings at Carol Drury’s home (and at her brother’s) in which the canvases, not on stretchers and unframed, are like Chinese vertical scrolls, with only a stick at the top for hanging. One complication is that he never gave titles or dates to his works and he did not like to talk about the world he had created, so one has to refer to the subject matter of each one and try to intuit the meanings he intended to communicate.
The gallery is on the south side of Carol Drury’s home, on the back wall upon entering, is a large abstract picture that is predominately blue but has areas of light and dark yellows, orange and black, of curving forms on top of an area of darker blue, all floating in space. There is a sense of depth with the receding blues and everything has the most carefully considered proportions so as to give an overall balance to the composition. Eyes are drawn to the yellow area first but then explore the rest of the painting. As Paul Klee observes, “we take a journey through the work,” also feeling the different rhythms of repeated short black lines in the middle right. The curving forms themselves almost suggest some kind of mysterious calligraphy.
A woman, her eyes closed, with red lipstick, but an eerie green color to her skin, lies with plant leaves to the right, but more abstract colors frame the left. It’s hard to tell whether she is meditating or dreaming.
Five separate abstract forms, one on top of another, on a purple-ish background, again are like arabesque letters in their elegant curving forms that almost touch each other with a certain tension, all very carefully laid out on the canvas with an exacting sense of proportion. An “updated Odaleague” brings to mind Titian (the Venus of Urbino) and Manet (Olympia). Here an entirely nude woman lounges on a bed (somewhat inexplicably) with a rooster over her head, all with a pervasive sensuousness. It also evokes Rodin’s poetic description of the Venus de Milo where he compares the female body to the flow of a natural landscape. There is a strong underlying veneration of women here, through the almost Fauve-like free use of color lends mystery to everything.
A smaller scale abstract work has a bold pink script form with intertwining form with intertwining curves and dynamic advancing and receding areas, juxtaposed with scattered black fragments in the upper right, all in a tight composition, where all the different visual energies are held in balance.
The portrait of a woman combines abstract elements with figurative ones, as she looks very tentatively out at the viewer. Her emotions seem ambiguous.
Another abstract work has self-contained forms, quite colorful compared to the rather subdued palette of the other similar works. The strong sense of spatial depth gives a floating quality to the elements, as if disregarding gravity, all consciously conceived.
The last painting viewed in the gallery has particularly broad, calligraphic shapes, flowing strongly, rich in texture and rhythms.
Not shown but worth seeing upstairs in Carol Drury’s studio are fifteen paintings from Harold Drury’s last series, “Warriors.” They integrate animal and human figures dramatically, with dynamic diagonals, often having multiple applications of layers of paint for their effect, all working in some mythical, archetypal world of the imagination.
The gallery is the home and studio of Carol Drury, his daughter, and is open on Tuesday through Saturday from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call (802) 533-2163 or go online at carolrosalinddrury@gmail.com
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
