SF Arts: Maybaum Gallery – Photorealism by Greg Haynes

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Category: Art, Museums, Galleries

Published on Wednesday, 03 March 2021 08:26

Written by Janet Walker

Maybaum Gallery is pleased to announce Mirror Effect, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Greg Haynes. This is his first solo show on the West Coast and features a collection of six new original pieces.

Greg Haynes is a hyper realist oil painter based outside of Boston, Massachusetts. From a young age Haynes gravitated to pencil drawing and the detail that it offered.

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Throughout his childhood and teenage years he refined his ability by mimicking artists like M.C.Escher and practicing observational drawing for hours on end.

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In his teens he was introduced to oil painting and quickly fell in love with it.

Over the years, he explored a number of painting styles, but ultimately detailed realism took hold, and Haynes progressed to more complicated subject matter. The complexity of painting glass was intriguing to Haynes. He says: "When we look at glass we see the surface, what is reflected, and what lies beyond." Haynes presents glass jars and bottles as portraits that express a life of their own, projecting personality and character.

His subjects are often in larger-than-life scale, depicted at close range with extraordinary detail, precision, and verisimilitude.

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His compositions are tightly cropped, zooming in on textures, surfaces, and the play of light and shadow that, while utterly and convincingly portrayed, surpass mere mechanical representation of form.

"For the past few years I've been working with a number of themes that involve the reflections and visual distortion that various objects create. Glass and metal are two of the predominant materials of choice. I like the idea that you can achieve natural effects that play tricks on the eye. A successful painting to me is one that really engages the viewer and makes them stop to figure out everything that is happening within the plane of the canvas. This is an ongoing exploration for me and one I hope to continue for years to come. That is one of the great things about art, you can spend years on one idea and still have many different directions to take it in," said Greg Haynes.

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Greg Haynes graduated from the Hartford Art School in 2003 with a BFA in Fine Art. His work has been exhibited extensively in the US and in private collections around the world. Haynes is represented by Maybaum Gallery, San Francisco.

The Maybaum Gallery is located at 49 Geary Street, Suite 416, San Francisco, CA, and is currently open by appointment only.