PLACES
Paintings by Marvin Saltzman

Wed. 1/18/2012 - Fri. 2/24/2012
Opening Reception and Slide Lecture by Marvin Saltzman
Wed. 1/18/2012 @ 7 pm

Marvin Saltzman was a faculty member in the Studio Arts program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for over thirty years. After his retirement in 1996, Mr. Saltzman received the prestigious North Carolina Award in Fine Arts. He just celebrated his 80th birthday with a retrospective of twenty-four of his former painting students at the Mahler Fine Arts Gallery in Raleigh, NC. Saltzman attended the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Southern California, and taught at several colleges before moving to UNC.

For the past twenty years Saltzman‘s paintings have been generated from site-specific drawings. His documentary travels have taken him across Europe, from England, Ireland, and Scotland, to Norway, Switzerland, and France; from the deserts of the American Southwest, to the coastal swamps of Pawley‘s island in South Carolina.

He uses a non-objective system of marks, squares, circles, and arrows to move the eye of the viewer away from the predictable linear and rectangular divisions of the canvas. This adhesion of color and composition is what he refers to as "the total painting system."

"Color is inherent in everything. It is underneath; it is inside. It‘s just like a garment that is blue. The dye is not necessarily on the surface of the garment. It is in the fiber, so what you are really seeing is the top of the fiber; and the side of the fiber; and it is that aspect that I also do in painting."

Marvin Saltzman

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