ABOUT:
Wayne Toepp is a Hudson Valley painter living in Poughkeepsie and maintaining a studio in Hyde Park. His process is driven by the material qualities of oil paint, layering thick paint applications alternated with delicate glazes. His work has been featured in numerous soloexhibitions spanning four decades as he has continued to examine the boundaries between abstraction and representation. Toepp activates mystical and poetic potentialities, all the while embracing contradiction as a viable creative outcome . The atmospheres and images within his works carry potent associations with both art historical and literary references, from northern romantic painting and haunted surrealist tableaus to images called forth by works of Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot. The muted interiority of his paintings suggest half-lit chambers and the barely discerned outlines of presences – everything in a state of luminescent flux, evoking memories of place and otherworldly light.