Luke Dougherty’s Fable: A Strong Show at Hawk and Hive
By Patricia Wadsley
All photos courtesy of Hawk and Hive
This past Saturday, the painter Luke Dougherty returned to Hawk and Hive in Andes with his second solo show. Fable runs through October 18th, and its title captures the feeling of diverse images, all of which tell different tales.
Dougherty ‘s work could be called abstract figuration, and the artist plays with that concept in numerous ways. In Dougherty’s imagined world, animals have more agency than humans. Dougherty has drawn a strong following partly through his unusual large scale paintings of animals. They are creatures inspired by his personal history, and his feeling for the natural world, yet they are far removed from nature drawing.
One piece, “Like Wind in the Trees,” (on display at Hawk and Hive’s back room.) shows an edge-to-edge swirl of white rabbits, disconnected from the earth, set on a luminous background of glistening rose-pink,. The rabbits tumble and arch, all heading towards a single destination. In the artist’s hands, these symbols of trickery and transformation straddle the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastic. Daugherty has a down-to-earth reason for this iteration too. “It’s based on a real love of the concept of murmuration,” says Daugherty., “where many individuals coalesce yet keep each one’s individuality.” One might venture that it’s a metaphor for the community found in these mountains, Dougherty’s adopted home.
Another image that stands out, “High Meadow” depicts a deer Dougherty spotted through tall grass while he zoomed to an appointment. “I put myself in the deer’s place,” he says. “While I was racing along the turnpike, she must have been wondering, ‘what is all this speed about? ‘ I caught a glimpse of myself and my own insanity,” says Dougherty. “When I returned to my studio, I wanted to capture the stillness that deer had in that moment, which I could use in my daily life.”
In contrast to his paintings of animal life, and no less powerful are Dougherty’s somber monochromatic works featuring stark human figures and structures. There is minimal information given in these paintings. The figures are often faceless, their relationships undetermined. Their enormous depth of feeling are conveyed solely with posture, scale and color. Dougherty’s palette of warm grays, browns and chalky earth tones, convey a certain comfort, beckoning the viewer to learn more.
These pieces are part of a series, called Bethlehem,” imbued with the colors from his childhood in the former steel city of Buffalo., New York, He creates these scenes by arranging still lifes from figures he’s found from model train sets. “I set them down and move them around and when the vibe is right I start painting.” One might say he keeps the people faceless so that any viewer can see himself in the frame, or to impart a sense of timelessness. Dougherty hopes that the people who possess his works pass them down to their descendants.
Dougherty. who also teaches art at SUNY Oneonta, came to live in Bovina after attending Hunter College, the Art Students’ League and the Water Street Atelier. He revealed a day-to-day step in his creative process.
“Each morning, I take a walk and for the first ten minutes my mind is running through petty grievances. As I walk, my mind releases those grievances, and I tell myself there’s a better way to use my mind. That’s when a notion will come to me, or a method a of explaining something to my students, or a way to communicate to someone in my art circle.”
Fable runs through October 18 at hawk and Hive, Main Street, Andes.