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Acclaimed Watertown designer Aaron Szymanski explores light and shadow through his paintings of urban architecture in his current exhibition running through December 12 at the Good News Cafe & Gallery.
The show presents selections from his series of paintings portraying the architectural and industrial landscape of Connecticut towns such as Collinsville and Thomaston as well as other sites in the United States and abroad. His primary subjects for the series were old factories, barns and abandoned buildings, which became the inspiration for his artistic study of design elements in these structures and his experimentation with color and composition.
“The focus of the series is not actually the architectural subject matter, but rather my ability to explore and render the stylistic elements—color, light, design and composition,” he said. “This show is a result of my deep enjoyment of color mixing, and an exploration of the basic principle of light and shadow, represented as a variation in color and darkness.”
The unique appreciation of design, composition, color and light in Szymanski’s paintings flows naturally from his professional accomplishments over the past 15 years as an internationally recognized designer of retail environments and products. A graduate of Columbus College of Art and Design, he initially designed commercial displays and store environments for major retailers such as Disney and Land Rover before turning to his present specialization in product design.
At the age of 28 in 1997, Szymanski founded Watertown-based Evo Design, which has emerged as a leader in innovative design of products for national retailers such as Nike, LeapFrog, Timex, Samsonite, Schick and Chantal. As vice president and design director, he and his Evo team have won numerous design awards for products ranging from the Timex “grip clip,” Chantal “wave kettle” and LeapFrog children’s “activity table” to a traveling exhibit display for Architecture of Humanity’s mobile HIV/AIDS clinic in Africa.
Szymanski’s show at Good News offers another perspective of his artistic vision, reduced to a precise geometry of lines, angles and shapes and the elemental foundations of color and light. In the title work of the exhibition, “Brick Yellow Collinsville,” the artist said, “I was striving for a stark, unblended look similar to a silk-screened poster. To achieve this, I determined the color of the dominant elements of the composition and mixed them in labeled, sealable jars while I was still sketching the composition in pen and ink. I wanted to cover the majority of the canvas with the warm, brown river color, and the rest with variations on the main color, an earthy yellow. The green snuck in as I attempted to make the orange tones look redder.”
Elements in his paintings reminiscent of American artist Edward Hopper reflect his affinity for Hopper’s mastery of “separating color, shadow and light in a way that created emotion,” Szymanski observed. “In many of my smaller study paintings, I attempt to mimic this style without the retro iconography that Hopper has. I try to achieve this by assigning equal value to both object and light.”
In the later works of his “Collinsville” series, Szymanski’s artistic style reveals an evolution in technique. “I stopped trying to eliminate the brush strokes and began mixing the color as I painted rather than prior to painting,” he said. “This pushed me farther from my aesthetic. In ‘Blue Cemetery,’ I lost control and focus in the purples and yellows in the far treeline; the painting ‘Grey Road’ held similar challenges as the colors were taken over by the subject matter.
“What kept me focused on the series was the idea of pushing how much color I could add to objects without the overall feel and character being lost to a strange illustrative look,” he explained. “The last piece in the series, titled ‘Self Portrait,’ is really the first piece in my next series. I plan to paint portraits of people in contemporary scenes, using what I learned from this series to give the people and their activities an active but architectural stature.”
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