The Polk Museum of Art Shows “plein air” Paintings by Lilian Garcia-Roig

Written by Chester Grunwald Sunday, 13 November 2011 23:06

Lakeland, FL.- The Polk Museum of Art will showcase paintings by “plein air” landscape painter Lilian Garcia-Roig through December 10th. The exhibition, titled “En Plein Sight,” will include a new painting that she worked on this summer at the Disney Wilderness Preserve. Garcia-Roig is a native of Cuba and serves as a professor of art at Florida State University. Although her work is rooted in historical convention, she transcends the typical definition of a landscape painter. Her large-scale, surface-leavened works pivot between the recognizable and the abstract. Her intent is to reconcile the two opposing styles by picking up where Vincent van Gogh left off: painting outdoors (or en plein air) with thick thrashes of paint to produce lavish landscapes.

Yet, Garcia-Roig invents a tangent by allowing the landscape to dissolve into an arrangement of abstract forms; her paintings begin to appear less like natural landscapes and more like arrangements of abstract forms the closer a viewer gets to the artwork. Her chosen painting style only contributes to this oscillation between realism and abstraction, combining brushwork with thick globs of color forced directly onto the canvas from paint tubes. These paintings arrive at being unconventional by way of progressing what was once conventional.

Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts in Central Florida. The Museum is one of the Top 10 art museums in the State of Florida, an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and the only art museum accredited by the American Association of Museums serving the 561,000 residents of Polk County. It was originally established by the Junior Welfare League in 1966 and called the Imperial Youth Museum. The museum was renamed Polk Public Museum in 1969 as part of its expanded focus on art, history, and science. The museum's current name was adopted as part of its first building campaign in the 1980s. The museum currently displays art from the Pre-Columbian era through the contemporary, featuring hundreds of works each year in a variety of exhibits. These exhibits often revolve around a central theme or idea and link artworks from the ancient past with those of modern artists. Polk Museum boasts a permanent collection of over 2,500 works and a number of traveling exhibits which provide diverse displays that include American folk art, modern masters, japanese prints and textiles, african art, a permanent Pre-Columbian display, and much more. Visit the museum's website at ... www.PolkMuseumofArt.org

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