“One thing hastens into being, another hastens out of it. Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be. Flux and change are for ever renewing the fabric of the universe, just as the ceaseless sweep of time is for ever renewing the face of eternity. In such a running river, where there is no firm foothold, what is there for a man to value among all the many things that are racing past him?”

--Marcus Aurelius

Joel Werring

We are pleased to add the work of Joel Werring to the gallery. Joel lives in New York now but I had first seen his work some years ago while he was living in California and showing at Campbell Thiebaud Gallery. I was pleased when he walked into the gallery on a recent visit and wanted to bring this different point of view into the gallery for visitors to experience. These are paintings that invite you to travel within them. In a swirling mass of time and constant change, forms and symbols define themselves amid the ever present vastness, always moving and changing. Within these fascinating webs of moving space created by sweeping bands of color and light, Werring captures images of vessels and objects floating by. They are always seen in context of a much larger reality and one that is never static. In his own words. . .

For many years, painting has allowed me to explore dichotomies between the natural and man-made world, order and chaos, artifice and reality, and presence and memory. My paintings are never about single events; rather, they are about how time has the power to change forms. They are containers for space, like webs that catch primary ideas and incidental thoughts, or dwellings that trace a lived experience. The varied forms in my paintings never inhabit a single dimension; instead, there are multiple objects that are loosely connected in different levels of space and resolved at different paces. In some ways, I see these images as passersby; they gather and linger or fade over time, like memory.

Joel Werring was born in Phoenix Arizona and resides now in New York. He graduated with honors from UC Berkeley and received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University. He has taught painting and drawing most recently at Boston University. In 2003, he received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Painting. Werring has had solo and group exhibitions in California, Arizona and New York.

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