Stanley Lewis and Gregory Botts exhibit landscape paintings at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries

An exhibition at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York from September 8 to October 2, 2004, featured landscape paintings by Stanley Lewis and Gregory Botts. Both artists demonstrate how the genre can be renewed through intense visual engagement, though their methods differ sharply. Lewis, in his early 60s, creates thickly painted canvases with deep troughs from repeated cutting and repositioning. His works like "Matt Farnum’s Farm, Chautauqua, NY" show agitated surfaces yet achieve taut design, with muted colors and precise compositional balance. Botts, age 52, employs agile surfaces and fragmented designs, drawing on Cubist paradoxes and economical color patches to render tangible effects, as seen in "Western Sky #2" and "Spring Vanishes Scraps of Winter." The pairing highlights their distinct approaches to perception and paint, with Lewis obsessively reworking and Botts finessing details. The exhibition underscores painting as a demanding art form requiring deep dedication, resulting in idiosyncratic outcomes.