Gallery Hop – Natural Selections: Paintings by Robert James Foose

The exhibition will feature major oil paintings created between 1993 and the artist’s death in 2013, with three bodies of work represented: the Creek series, the Pond series, and Flora and Fauna.

The first series, Unnatural Selections, are close-up views of foliage and flowers in the dense woods and underbrush along Kentucky’s creeks. The paintings are complicated, containing a great variety of marks and brushstrokes, evoking the essential fecundity and chaos of nature, teeming with life. In explaining his work, Foose said, “The painter has something that other image makers do not have, and that is chance, or the unexpected accident or gesture. The ability to recognize the quality of the accident is more important than that which is often called skill.”