Eleanor Harwood Gallery is delighted to announce a two-person exhibit with Andrew Huffman and Martin Machado. Wave Forms marks the beginning of the gallery's new “Atrium Spotlight” series, presented on the outer walls of the gallery. Wave Forms juxtaposes very different interpretations of the physics of a curve.
Huffman breaks down the components of the San Francisco landscape and renders sharp colorful geometry representing the California coastline and the Golden Gate bridge as abstraction. He leaves us with enough references, by titling the works International Orange 1 and 2 and using “safety orange” in the paintings, to allow us to infer that he is painting the Bay Area’s most iconic bridge. His paintings are meditations on his own uncoupling and looking forward to venturing into new territories and relationships.
Machado’s “My Wake Series” are paintings that depict the roiling surface of the water viewed from high upon a container ship. Marchado works in the commercial maritime industry, pulling imagery, and in this case, physical charts from his journeys and uses them as source material for his oil paintings.
Waterscapes and their shifting motions lend themselves to endless interpretation. These artists are both travelers, experiencing the ocean from its depths, beaches and thoroughfares. The water changes as do our lives. The work in this show is full of movement, using pattern and color variation to carry our eyes across the canvas. The ocean is a dynamic, unstable system. This instability forces us to adapt ourselves and our perspectives; Huffman tightens up the lines, while Marchado abstracts the waves even further.
Andrew Huffman
Born (1986) in Newton, Kansas, the youngest of five creative, artistically gifted children, Huffman was reared in the historic city of Lawrence, Kansas, home of the pre-Civil War abolitionists known as Jayhawkers. He continues to be influenced significantly by his love of skateboarding, biking, music, art, traveling, teaching, reading, mountains, fishing, camping, documentaries, cooking, gardening, and spontaneous human interaction in his home of Denver, Colorado and beyond.
Martin Machado
For over two decades, Martin has had his feet in two very different endeavors, that of the art world and of the maritime industry. His labor on the water has taken him around the globe on international containerships, commercial fishing vessels, and sailing boats. The ports and the people he has worked alongside have become intertwined with the layers of his art, a visual storytelling that is based on his own experience, but reaches back to the history of maritime exploration and our core human connections to the sea.
