The Eastport Gallery opens its 26th season with works on canvas and paper by the well known artist Arthur Cadieux.
Born in Belfast, Maine, Arthur considers himself a Downeast Expressionist and many of his paintings do reflect coastal subject matter. However, the great body of his work includes portraits, figures, landscapes, and cityscapes from everywhere Arthur has lived, but it’s the expressionist facet of his work that those who are drawn to his pieces most appreciate. The heightened color and an unmistakable rhythm are riveting and one can almost hear the music that Arthur dances to as he paints.
“When its jazz I’m listening to, that’s when the colors come out. The music and the dancing helps me find a new way to look at the familiar.” Starting a painting in the conventional way, Arthur then ” destroys” the piece by “bringing it back to get that crucial balance between chaos and order, the yin and yang that works together to put harmony in the painting. I want to offer the viewer a vision of conflict and excitement, the appearance of pattern, and pattern upset, and of ugliness and beauty all at the same time.”
A studio painter Arthur draws on influential trends in all of the arts of the past century. “I am interested in all of the “ism’s,” but I have never fully recovered from seeing the work of Van Gogh, Matisse, and Bonnard.” Like them, Arthur pushes his paintings to the edge, “going for broke,” and at times “disregarding the rules of taste in order to produce a successful piece. In my current work I have an ongoing, active dialogue between the art of the past and the art of the present. I use an image as a pretext to create the paintings within me.”
He employs literature, music, politics, social change, or anything else that moves him as an impetus to paint his own view of reality with strong color and bold strokes.
Arthur, who holds both a Bachelor’s Degree and a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts has 20 shows to his credit in both the U.S. and Europe his work will be featured at the Gallery from June 9th through June 25th.