Toward The Light: 

An Exhibition of Paintings by Darrell Orwig

In a new body of work created within the period of March 2014 to March 2016, artist Darrell Orwig brings us inside a personal vortex of psychological trauma, caused by an event that changed his life forever. The accident, and loss of another man’s life, became the moment when time stopped, and darkness took over like an ominous claustrophobic shroud. The act of painting was the best way to cope and transfer the emotion of this tragedy. Toward the Light reveals twenty-five works organized by four periods, in the artists’ on-going process of healing.   

The Small Darks are the first works, seen as non-objective compositions that show a consistent darkness in the mood of chaos and hopelessness. These transitional studies are all made using oil pastel on paper. Orwig has mastered this portable medium documenting the memory of landscapes, people and experiences that are seen in earlier works beginning in the 1960’s. Some of these small works use color as the carrier of emotion with sudden rhythmic blurs of multicolored forms. Perhaps as homage to Gerhard Richter’s painting style of blurring out excess unimportant information, Orwig chooses to economize these small works at the risk of saying too much.

A turning point into five Large Abstracts reveals permutations of his smaller works, which seemingly come out of darkness into non-objective abstract forms of shape and color, avoiding classification. Orwig painted over old canvases from his studio, in a physical act of disassociation from past work, in a cleansing gesture towards private healing. Two of these works powerfully express the reoccurring triggers of impact and fear, painted in precise cutting vertical forms, dividing the canvas and symbolically stopping a time warp. Emotional content is the strength of these works.

Out of the Fog consists of five large monochromatic oil paintings with the identifiable subject matter of roadways. Atmospheric blends of black and white paint, and small glints of color, direct our eyes in and through each work, with converging lines of carefully planned linear perspective, leading us as the artist states, “out of the fog, and into the light.”  These escape- hatch passage ways are part of the compositional mastery Orwig has learned through half a century of painting and a lifetime of stylistic development. Still the mood prevails with the inclusion of symbolic elements that hold mystery, suggesting danger around the bend on a road that leads nowhere, then somewhere. The heavy laden fog gives us a lonely feeling yet the compositional elements allude to a human presence and connection of support. These paintings are optimistic beacons of hope.

The final layer titled Into The Light includes four oil paintings inspired by the Navajo Nations’ Monument Valley Park, in Arizona. Here, we see a southwestern landscape the artist frequently visits on horseback riding trips, documenting his journey with sketchbooks full of observational drawings. The sienna colored land masses, offer obstacles of weight and earthly grounding, then push upward to cerulean blue sky openings, offering a carefully placed portal of exit. 

In its entirety, Toward the Light shows an oscillation of style from expressionistic realism to abstraction and back again, giving us an appreciation of the artists’ ability to harness the cathartic process of painting. There is a spiritual presence of reverence, where sorrow has been lifted through forgiveness, and acceptance of the things we cannot control.

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of William “Bill “Kennedy Lyon,

July 30, 1958 – March 1, 2014.

Exhibition statement by Neida Bangerter.