VERGENCE: FRANK HOBBS & CLAY JOHNSON

VERGENCE explores a juxaposition between two Bond Millen Gallery painters: Frank Hobbs & Clay Johnson. When placed together, the works begin a conversation that explores and expands the ideas of landscape and composition.

FRANK HOBBS - BIO & STATEMENT

Frank Hobbs is a painter, printmaker and draftsman. Born in Lynchburg, VA, he studied art at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and later at American University in Washington, DC. He lived and had a studio in Staunton, VA for 15 years, teaching at Washington and Lee University from 1987 until 2004, and for 11 years at the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, which he co-founded in 1992. He currently works as a Professor of Art at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, where he teaches painting and drawing. 

CLAY JOHNSON - BIO & STATEMENT

Clay Johnson was born in Durham, North Carolina, where he studied art and art history at Duke University. Clay began work on his Strata Series shortly after relocating to Wyoming, and, while non-objective in nature, the paintings convey a sense of the wide open landscape of the American west. As the series has developed over the decades, it has become further abtracted and dove deeper into the relationships between formal elements such as color, texture, proportion, etc., and the ability of those relationships to create an abstract narrative. With each section of a painting extending across the entire surface, from one edge to the other, there is the sense that those spaces might extend infinitely beyond the edges of the picture. That breathing room gives him the latitude to create the story of a particular painting.