SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery will present The Shimmering World, an exhibition of new paintings by Terry Powers.

The importance of observation and painting from life is at the heart of Powers’ practice. He uses no technology that was not in place 600 years ago, never working from a photograph, always painting what is directly before his eyes. He paints people, places, and objects that he sees every day: his walk to work, his running routes, his studio, his living room. This body of work is an extension of an ongoing project of seeing and painting, a formal inquiry into observation and rendition.

This body of work can be split into a grouping of interior paintings and more recent exterior paintings. Those who have spent a winter in Utah will know that the elements do not have the patience for painting, so Powers is relegated in these months to the indoors. He paints his studio and his home slowly, on bigger canvases with tighter details. Here, he has control of the light, and can spend hours looking at the same scene, unchanged. When the frost breaks, Powers paints outdoors. These outdoor paintings are smaller and looser as his hand aims to capture a scene as the light shifts and figures move beyond the frame.

In this way, for Powers, style develops as a means of communication. His loose renderings appears more finely adherent to realism than they are in truth. His deft command of value provides clarity to the dappled surface. The texture evolves as he aims to efficiently convey visual stimuli on the canvas. Powers’ paintings are like looking through a window — you witness the image distorted by the lens, but implicitly trust in the reality of it.

For Powers, there is no anecdotal quality to the work — as much as a viewer accustomed to the tradition of painting may want to glean meaning from the arrangement of a still life, to ascribe life to the clementines strewn across a table or death to the skull toy teetering on the edge, it is necessary to let go of these repeated symbols and take the image as it is seen. These paintings are an exploration of light and composition, and subject matter serves as a vehicle to create something visually interesting.

Powers presents the scene in bare fidelity on the canvas. He fixes his eye on observation and conveyance, creating paintings that resonate at the tenor of the viewer. His object is inert, a frank portrayal of his world, a moment captured as light and time carry on their daily journeys.

Terry Powers was born in 1980 in Sacramento. He earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design followed by an MFA from Stanford University. He was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and in 2017 was named the Diebenkorn Fellow. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Utah State University. This is his second solo show with Dolby Chadwick Gallery.