Ollie Balf: A Bright Life – Reception

Ollie Balf: A Bright Life – Reception
November 13, 5-8pm
Founders Gallery, 248 Cabot St, Beverly, MA

Join us for a multi-faceted affair celebrating the work of Ollie Balf, Montserrat emerging-artists’ work, and a critical conversation exploring the legacy of Hans Hofmann.

Ollie Balf: A Bright Life
Reception, 5-8pm
+
Color & Abstraction: Students Respond to Hans Hofmann
Reception, 5-8pm
+
Lydia Gordon & Tim Harney: The Impact of Hofmann
Gallery Discussion, 6:30-7:30pm

Event created in conversation with “Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction” currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum.

In the late 1940s after graduating college, Balf would go on to live in New York and studied at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. While in those years artists from New York flocked to the coasts of Massachusetts, instead of following Hofmann to Provincetown, Balf landed in Rockport, MA, spending his first summer there in 1947. Balf was among the founding faculty of Montserrat which was officially open for enrollment in 1970.

Balf fell in love with water-coloring on Cape Ann, a medium he’d never been formally taught but later declared his favorite. In between visits to Old Garden Beach and East Gloucester’s Hawthorne Inn Jazz Club, he knocked out three paintings a day.

“Watercolor is full of surprises,” he once wrote. “Colors are always different when wet, and unpredictable when dry. Accidents are part of the process and you handle the accidents differently each time they occur, so you never know what the final result will be.”

A Bright Life features eight framed and fourteen unframed watercolors from various years, ranging from abstract to observational.