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 Doug Cloninger Mother Nature on the Run April 9 – May 2, 2015 Castor gallery is pleased to announce Louisiana-­‐based artist Doug Cloninger’s first solo show Mother Nature on the Run, with an opening reception on April 9 from 7-­‐9 pm. Influenced by the Louisiana landscape, Cloninger’s series echo the landscape’s colors and tones. His works yield to a palette of blues, pinks, greens, and tans to provoke an overarching feeling of serenity and peacefulness, and a space of contemplation. Influenced heavily by nature and its binaries of chaos and order, Cloninger wishes to create a conversation between environment and medium while avoiding form altogether. In making paintings that are Pass Me By – Oil on Canvas – 22x26 inches devoid of figure and gesture, as well as discovering and exhuming the feel of each piece, Cloninger focuses on each painting’s emotive qualities. All figurative representation is abandoned for atmospheric qualities and all colors are displayed at once, layered on top of one another in each work. To Cloninger, this parallels nature in its ability to sway between chaos and organization – when one looks at a vista, there is a ‘random order’ visible, however, up close, nature is messy and happenstance, there is no certainty to it. Looking at Cloninger’s work from afar, the viewer attempts to organize and make sense of it. However, as the viewer moves closer towards the paintings the qualities of depth and order observed at first seem to dissolve. These works allows the viewer to experience nature’s more subtle beauty – the beauty of the mundane and random. The essence of Cloninger’s work – nature, dissipates into pure abstraction, through the texture of the canvases poking through the thin veils of oil, Big Buddha Belly – Oil on Canvas – and through the minute ways in 30x40 inches which tones fade and shift across the surface. By obscuring his subject, and in turn his brush stroke, Cloninger sought to remove an obvious presence of personality and gesture, that has been expected of most abstract painters. For him, he is interested in capturing a broader and more universal voice than his own. Mother Nature on the Run is both a somber and celebratory series dedicated towards the impermanence of human contribution against the relatively staid forces of nature. The works are not focused purely on their ecological influences; however, their emotional availability is rooted in the wonderment of nature. Mother Nature on the Run opens on Thursday, April 9 and continues through to Saturday, May 2.