The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, co-founder of Windsor with husband Galen and creative director for The Gallery at Windsor, welcomed Windsor members and invited guests to a cocktail reception last Friday evening to celebrate this season’s exhibiting artist Christopher Le Brun and the opening of his exhibition, Composer. A two-part exhibition, 16 large-scale oil paintings by Le Brun will be featured at The Gallery at Windsor, shown concurrently with 12 new paintings exhibited at the Albertz Benda in New York.
“The gallery has a very good reputation as far as the previous exhibitions are concerned,” said Weston, looking with pride as she credited daughter Alannah with conceiving the idea for the gallery 15 years ago. “And tonight we feel greatly honored and privileged to welcome Christopher Le Brun. Christopher is a much renowned artist who also holds the office of president of the Royal Academy in London. This exhibition Composer highlights the profound influence of music on Christopher’s work.”
Le Brun thanked the Westons for their warm welcome, and gave a brief overview of the exhibition, noting that the Composer theme was derived from his painting of the same name.
“I realized that I’ve spent my life in my studio listening to music. This is what artists do all the time. There’s barely a phrase in music that comes on that I can’t recognize; it’s been so long that I’ve been doing this,” said Le Brun. “So in a sense, it’s rather a personal exhibition, in that I feel I owe a debt of gratitude to all of those composers who meant such a lot to me over the years.”
He suggested viewers think in terms of how an artist or musician composes, stressing the complicated structure and depth of classical music, particularly composers from the early 20th century, which he said was an enormously exciting time.
“Artists and composers were moving out of strict conventional space into new space such as cubism in the earliest 20th century, but also, with composers like [Arnold] Schoenberg, moving from understood tonal music to atonal music to a world full of new structures.”
Rather than think in terms of the phrase “a painting of something,” he proposes viewers consider that “a painting IS something.”
“It’s not a secret message, it’s not a code, it’s not a picture I had in my head that I make for you. It’s a thing; a built thing like a piece of music,” said Le Brun. “And of course music doesn’t really have any value unless it produces feelings; not what you ought to feel, but what you really feel. That’s the aim of the destination of art; to make us feel something. But please don’t ask me what it means – I don’t know. No, or what you should feel either.”
Composer is open to the public at The Gallery at Windsor by appointment thru April 27. For reservations call 772-388-4071.
