The Spirit of Collage Paintings: Works by Arless Day
Morris Museum of Art
Augusta, Georgia
themorris.org
Through November 6, 2022
The artist Arless Day (b. 1951) is set to present his second solo exhibition at Augusta’s Morris Museum of Art. This one will feature more than 30 collage paintings dating back to 2002 — a range of cityscapes, florals, and domestic interiors that Day has made by combining collage with gouache or acrylic.
The resulting works are boldly colored and painterly in effect, a unique blend of realism with the expressiveness that artists of our time have inevitably absorbed from modernism.
“The exuberant energy I had for art as a child is still within me,” Day declares. He grew up in Baton Rouge in an artistic family; his father was a woodcarver and his uncle was a teaching artist at various colleges and universities. The young man went on to graduate from the Ringling College of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida, where he met his wife, Patsy Mauldin. Ultimately, the couple ran a successful illustration and design studio in Charlotte.
It was at that North Carolina city’s Mint Museum that Day became enthralled by a 1981 exhibition of flower and landscape paintings created by the great realist Joseph Raffael (b. 1933). That aha moment inspired Day to turn to art full-time, and seven years later he made his first collage painting. That has been his principal medium ever since, and this summer’s show underscores how highly suitable it is to his talent.
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