Seeing Nature
Cap Pannell and Stephen Pentak
SANTA FE, NM. Cap Pannell and Stephen Pentak are featured together in this exhibition of landscapes and cloudscapes that showcases their unique and contrasting interpretations of the world outside. The gallery has teamed one of its newest painters Cap Pannell with Stephen Pentak who is celebrating his sixth season with Owen Contemporary.
Cap Pannell interprets nature from his photographs and drawings to create the imagery for his oil paintings. “Someone once told me that art is the great journey”, Pannell explains. “With no roadmaps. No directions. Sometimes no known destination. And the only guidance you may be blessed with is intuition. Intuition fueled by imagination.”
“It’s light that sparks my imagination. Light fascinates me. In my landscapes I tend to focus on the graphic quality of the scene and emphasize the light. I manipulate it to express a mood, a time of day, even a season of the year. As for my cloudscapes, they give me the opportunity to approach the abstract. Although my work is derived from nature and representational, I leave it open to interpretation. My goal is to make something that resonates visually and emotionally, both for me and the viewer.”
Cap Pannell received a BFA in Graphic Design from North Texas State University. He resides in Dallas, TX where he has had a prestigious career in graphic illustration.
Like Cap Pannell, Stephen Pentak’s subject is the great outdoors but he is also not a plein air painter. Rather he works from his mind’s eye, pulling from memory the landscapes he has seen. His method is a tried-and-true combination of oil paints, wood panel, large brushes and palette knives. “I mix paint, cover paint and scrape down to a color underneath, right on the surface of the painting,” he says.
“It’s really important to me that the person seeing the painting is simultaneously aware of the landscape and the marks that went into making it, he says. Pentak’s work has been described as “calm” and peaceful,” which has surprised him. “I don’t think of myself as calm. I find that an interesting contrast, but I’ve come to accept it.”
Stephen Pentak received a BA from Union College in Schenectady, NY, and a MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He is Professor Emeritus of Art at Ohio State University and resides in upstate New York.