September 7th - September 28th, 2018

The Strand Center for the Arts was excited to host “Coloring Book,” sculptures created by Plattsburgh artist, Walter Early, in the Main Gallery on September 7, 2018.

 “Coloring Book” was an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Plattsburgh artist Walter Early.  The artwork included emphasizes line to define space and form.  The theme of still-life’s is heavily referenced as the pieces each refer to pausing time to focus on individual moments.

 Stemming from a friendly debate around the importance of contour versus mass in abstract art, Early uses metal-working tools to dismantle sculptures made by other artists. The sculptures began as planar, volumetric constructions in steel sheet that are displaced from their original context by cutting into them with a torch, leaving behind the jagged edges as evidence of the intervention. Most of the visual information is removed and the forms are distilled to the moments in which the original artist made decisions concerning the sculpture’s spatial limits: the welded contours. Bright monochrome pigment plays with perceptions of mass, weight, and volume.

 Early’s observational drawings of long-sedentary found objects are their own exploration of form. The physical evidence of passing time is referenced as a metaphor for lifecycles. In contrast to the austere rendering, the objects retain lighthearted absurdity as their forms are simultaneously disguised and enhanced by accumulations of snow and ice, overgrown with weeds or ivy, or simply haphazardly stacked on one another. 

 Walter Early (b. 1983, Jellico, TN) studied art at the University of Kentucky, and the University of Notre Dame, earning an MFA in 2011.  Since that time Early’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has lectured on art in the United States, Canada, and Honduras.  In 2012, with support from the Henry Moore Foundation, Early was resident artist at the Museum of Steel Sculpture in Coalbrookdale, England.  In 2016 an Individual Artist Grant from the city of Chicago supported his work and in the winter of that year he was a resident at the Grand Marais Art Colony on the shores of Lake Superior.  Early maintains a studio in Plattsburgh and works for the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.