David Richard Gallery is pleased to present Violets are Blue, an exhibition by New York-based artist Claire Seidl and her first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibit is comprised of 15 oil paintings, mostly on linen and a couple on canvas, painted during the fall of 2021 and the first part of 2022 with a just few from 2018 to 2020 that resonated with the new paintings. The compositions created by the artist’s layering of line and a range of subtle to bold gestural strokes will be readily recognized. However, the surprise in this new body of work is the broader, more vivid color palette that includes pinks, yellows, blues and reds.

The three paintings incorporating pink are the largest in the presentation and would even make De Kooning take pause. The variations in hues are from soft pink infused with yellow, thinly applied as the ground colors with overlays of thin, bold, linear strokes of black in The Big Picture that create an upbeat nod to spring. Another painting with pink, Believe You Me, is moodier with combinations of red and pink overlayed with thicker, bolder, wider strokes of black and white. The third painting, Take it From Me, uses darker pink with smudges of red infused with yellow to generate an orange glow. Black is also extensively used in the latter work, but in two contrasting ways: dark, fine, linear lines and thin, translucent swaths of black that read as dark gray revealing the warmer colors below.

The yellows are also very dynamic, ranging from: large passages of sun-kissed lemon yellow in It Don’t Mean A Thing, to thick, short smudges of a less vibrant ocher yellow on a neutralized grey-green ground accented with thin vertical strokes of bright yellow in This Must be the Place; then, all the way to a darker painting derived from the surface mixing of yellow with black that generates an olive green color with hints of bright yellow peeking through.