"Time Revisited," an exhibition that finds new interpretations of the works of Loren Dunlap and Brian O'Leary, will open at the Bridgehampton Museum's Nathaniel Rogers House on Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Curated by Lana Jokel, it will continue through Sept. 12.
Born in Indiana in 1932, Dunlap grew up during the school year in a small factory town and spent summers on his grandparents' farm, which maintained traditions and practices from the 18th and 19th centuries. That early connection to nature informed his later interest in still lifes, flowers, and landscape.
He trained and painted in abstract art during his formative years. In the late 1950s he began a series of imaginary landscapes that led to a cycle of tree paintings, created in California during the mid-'60s. In both cases, his method was to find images of nature in abstract situations.
His subjects are marked by a sensual surface beauty, a feeling for textures, the balance of different pictorial spaces, and compelling compositions. Beneath the surfaces, however, the paintings work as character studies, with each object becoming more meaningful, according to the museum.
Because of health issues, the artist recently turned to collage. "Dunlap's collages work with visual connective aspects, like synapses, and step back from the pictorial approach to painting," said Cee Scott Brown, who worked during the 1970s at the Museum of Modern Art and later served as director of the Holly Solomon Gallery. "His use of recycled paper goods and newspapers, labels, stamped envelopes, corrugated cardboard, clothing scraps, and paint artfully captures the viewer's attention and then as quickly requires one to connect the dots or focus the work to get the entire picture."
O'Leary studied economics at Duke University and never even met an artist until two years after graduation, when he was studying French at a school in Nice that welcomed artists and students of the language during the summers.
"The artists were going out into the countryside to paint every day, so I asked if I could go with them," he recalled during a conversation at his Water Mill studio. Until that summer, the idea of being an artist had never occurred to him.
Back home, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts, where one of his teachers was a friend of Robert Rauschenberg. During spring break, she and O'Leary went to Captiva Island in Florida and spent five days at Rauschenberg's compound. "The joy and beauty that just pours out of that guy was so phenomenal to me. I was completely inspired by it," O'Leary said.
The scale and dimensions of his paintings from the 1980s, many 8 by 12 feet, were inspired in part by the screen at the old St. Mark's Cinema on the Lower East Side. While elements of the compositions are realistic -- coffee cups, a hot dog on a roll, classical and mythological figures, a roiling ocean -- their disparate styles and often fragmentary images combine into complex and somewhat surreal landscapes bursting with color and dynamism.
O'Leary's work took a radical turn with the turn of the century. "I decided to take everything out of the painting I could take out, and still have it be a painting. It was the first time I had worked with no subject matter, no color, no images. If I got one, it had to go. Images can pop up really fast, you can't stop them when you're painting."
Color and recognizable images have now, to some degree, returned. Some of his more recent paintings combine oil with roofing tar, which is applied with a variety of tools to add dimension to the surfaces.
There are qualities to O'Leary's paintings, from the earliest years to the present, that are unmistakably his: complex, vibrant, all-over compositions; the juxtaposition of disparate, dynamic components, and a certain resistance to interpretation.
