Cornell gallery exhibits Iowa City artist’s landscape paintings

MOUNT VERNON — Iowa City artist Genie Hudson Patrick displays recent oil paintings in “Bounty,” an exhibit Nov. 5 through Dec. 3 in Cornell College’s Peter Paul Luce Gallery of McWethy Hall.

A reception for the artist is Sunday, Nov. 12, from 2-4 p.m. A gallery talk is Thursday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m.

Patrick’s paintings are subtle and evocative in their response to the Iowa landscape. Sometimes her work is quiet and still, but it also often includes elements that make it dramatic, acknowledging atmosphere, time of day, seasons, weather and other natural forces.

“These factors condition my responses to the landscape,” she says. “Retaining my initial abstract structure as my visual point of departure, I allow this more expanded view of nature to become my inspiration.”

Her work sometimes depicts human activity and what we build, such as roads, highway signs, posts, poles, ditches, bridges, barns and silos.

“Although such manmade elements intrude in the nature that these paintings observe, they always seem to refer and even defer to the broad and forceful sweep of form and rhythm present in the landscape,” she says.

Patrick’s work has been published in “Land of the Fragile Giants: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples of the Loess Hills,” “Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie” and “The Art of the State: Iowa.” She is represented by Hudson River Gallery in Iowa City and Olson-Larsen Galleries of West Des Moines.

Luce Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free.