Sedona’s Lanning Gallery hosts Billy Woolway

Written by Patrick Ragan Tuesday, 01 March 2011 23:54

SEDONA, AZ - Painter Billy Woolway is now in his late-80s and still painting, in his primitive style, subject matter that can make you cry.  On Friday evening, February 1^st, Sedona’s Lanning Gallery celebrates the work of this devoted artist with an opening reception from 5-8 p.m.  Inspired by the landscapes, people and animals around him, Woolway captures the feelings they evoke in acrylic on wood with found materials subtly used to highlight a detail and draw our real world into the world he paints.

The primitive nature of Woolway’s paintings speaks at once to an archetype of Americana and his subjects justly represent an American reality.  But the world he paints is often the one no one takes the time to see.  The disenfranchised get their due in this artist’s work: from migrant workers whose toil and plight is as much a part of our dinner as the sunshine and rain to lost dogs finding a friend after a long time wandering.  Woolway’s oeuvre asks us to look closer.

Woolway spent his life as a painter.  He also served in World War II in North Africa and Italy and had a long career in advertising.  Keeping a studio across from his Chicago office the artist would cross the street at lunchtime to teach a painting class.  “If I don’t paint, I hurt,” Woolway has said, “I paint what I feel and go where my brush takes me.”  A move west brought him into the world of lettuce and strawberry pickers, long now the subjects of his continuing series “Another Day, Another Dollar.”  In these works, bent backs appear next to flowers sprouting crushed metal bottle caps, soft mountains undulate behind often windowless houses, slender white figures frequent doorways lending a ghostly presence whose significance we may debate:  The lingering of lives from other harvests in other indistinguishable years?

Does the slender couple, who appear under the word “coming”, the man in a dark business suit, represent the simplicity of hope or the perennially elusive American dream?

Another continuing effort of Woolway’s is his “Lost Doggie” series.  After raising a dog he found abandoned in the desert, the artist could not help but capture and convey the fright, hunger and confusion so compellingly represented by their plight.  How can one not be moved by a title like “Lost Doggie Finds a Friend?”  The simplicity of the sentiment perfectly balances with the archetype of the displaced; a small thing becomes an enormous thing.  

Woolway’s paintings have been shown from the San Diego Museum of Art to the Art Institute of Chicago to the Smithsonian.  For information, call Lanning Gallery at 928.282.6865, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or visit www.lanninggallery.com.  Open daily: 10-6 Mon-Sat, 11-5 Sun.

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