For a review of the exhibition in Columbia's Free Times, CLICK HERE.
For installation images, CLICK HERE.
JEFF DONOVAN:
Three Decades/Twenty Years
A mid-career retrospective
January 8 – 19, 2010.
An if ART Gallery production @ Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, 808 Lady St., Columbia, S.C.
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, Jan. 8, 2010, 5 – 9 pm.
32-page, full color catalogue available.
To PREVIEW works for sale in the retrospective exhibition, CLICK HERE.
To PREVIEW works in the retrospective exhibition that are not for sale, CLICK HERE.
To see pictures of Donovan creating the sculpture Striped Ties Are In, CLICK HERE.
(Courtesy of Susan Lenz)
FROM THE CATALOGUE: Jeff Donovan has packed a good 20 years of art production into the three decades-plus that have passed since completing what he considers his first successful painting, Reclining Figure, c. 1977-78. That’s not to say that he didn’t do anything at all for a decade, but between the mid-1980s and ’90s, he wasn’t producing much art. “I wouldn’t even say that I drew in my sketchbook,” Donovan says. “I just doodled a little.” His 1984 painting The Yawnwas, in hindsight, a prelude to a decade of hibernation as an artist. He still managed the first version of Overhead, a man looking toward the sky, but went dormant after that. Still, one of the hibernation-era doodles in 1994 became the original, oil pastel version of Two Drunk Popes, the model for Donovan’s popular, hand-colored 1999 woodcut of which he had to print number 31/30 to have one himself. Another doodle became the 1994 painting The Friar With The Plywood Collar Goes Boating, which subsequently, in 2005, became one of Donovan’s first ceramic sculptures. Yet more doodles turned into...CLICK HERE to read more.
For a CHRONOLOGY of Donovan's career, CLICK HERE.
Images above: Study for The Friar With The Plywood Collar Goes Boating, n.d. (1984–1994), ballpoint pen on paper towel, 2 x 1 ½ in.; The Friar With The Plywood Collar Goes Boating, 1994, oil pastel and acrylic on primed linoleum, 20 x 16 in., collection of Georgia Lake, Cayce, S.C.; The Friar With The Plywood Collar Goes Boating, 2005, ceramic, 13 ¾ x 14 ½ x 9 in., collection of Heidi Darr-Hope and Stuart Hope, Columbia, S.C.
