The Bluffs by Holly Gordon
Every time artist Holly Gordon comes home to Long Island the visual bounty the Island offers strikes her. She shares that love of the area’s natural splendor in a new exhibit at the MacArthur Airport Gallery.
“I travel the world but keep touching down here on Long Island and every time I do so it is with wider eyes for the bounty we have right here,” Gordon said.
Long EYEland, on display through March 25, is a series of images from around the Island. Each image that you may at first mistake as a painting speaks to the creative inspiration Gordon finds on Long Island.
Beachy Keen by Holly Gordon
“MacArthur Airport has long been my center for taking off and coming home so symbolically it is the perfect place and the space is spacious and well lit,” Gordon said. “It’s great for Long Island too, especially if the artists are exhibiting work that represents our diverse location. Long Island has it all-if we choose to stop and see it.”
While a photographer Gordon describes herself as a painter with her camera manipulating light and angles to paint first with her camera and then later on her computer. While she uses software as part of her artistic process almost everything she does to the images are things she use to do in a darkroom. She calls her medium beyond digital photography.
Take one glance at the piece, “Seymour’s Boatyard,” and the colors draw you into the photograph and also give off a sense of warmth and longing for long, lazy, summer days.
Seymour’s Boatyard by Holly Gordon
“The art will also brighten the mood of our cold and bleak winter and give people opportunity to plan outings for spring,” Gordon said.
The boatyard made sailing ships back in the 1800s and is a popular painting spot that Gordon discovered while working with artist Ward Hooper. This exhibit is a prelude to a larger exhibition coming this summer entitled The Brush/Lens Project that Gordon and Hooper are currently collaborating on.
Included with the 17 photographs on display in Long EYEland, is a list of places for visitors to see if they can identity the locations in the images.
An artist’s reception for Long EYEland is taking place on March 7 from 1 to 3pm.
“The airport is a great visual opportunity with visitors coming and going and meeting and waiting to greet,” Gordon said. “It’s kind of like a trawler net-it takes in a lot but it only takes one of the many fish to see the art and connect.”