Water/Nymph

August 12, 2013, 9:30am

Eric Tillinghast: Water/Nymph at Richard Levy Gallery

Northern California-based artist Eric TiIlinghast has been working with water for almost two decades. His diverse oeuvre includes ambitious large-scale installations, sculpture, site-specific works, public art commissions and paintings. In his exhibition Water/Nymph, currently on view at Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, Tillinghast offers up 41 re-contextualized vintage postcards. In these works, he identifies the water feature and meticulously paints over the surrounding environments, leaving only the essential shape of the water and the occasional figures. In many cases, his obsessive process requires the application of 50 of more layers of paint to seamlessly blend and cover up the background image, leaving the surface impossibly smooth and almost devoid of the artist’s hand. As Tillinghast explores bodies of water in all forms - swimming pools, lakes, waterfalls, dams, watersheds and tidal flows, what emerges is a meditation of form in both a natural and domestic context. The results of this aesthetic experience offer a sublime contemplation of our perceptions of Earth’s most abundant resource. I recently had the opportunity to ask Tillinghast some questions about his process. -Claude Smith, Albuquerque/Santa Fe Contributor