Margin & Verge

Paintings by Anna Cypra Oliver

Opening Reception

Saturday, July 8, 12-6pm

510 Warren St. Gallery
Hudson, NY

Ever since she moved to the Berkshires six years ago, Anna Cypra Oliver has been obsessed with painting the meadows and roadside verges that line the roads of her semi-rural neighborhood, trying to capture them in all their tangled complexity. When Oliver paints, she tries to observe, as closely as possible, small splashes of light, changes in color, in shape, dark against light, the blue shadow of a flower carving itself into the bright green of a leaf. She looks hard for the telling detail, trying to see where light slashes against dark, where a form emerges in the background of a chaotic foreground. She’s drawn to bright color, to subtle shifts from one color to another, and to changes in light. It is really pattern that she is rendering; not the pattern of reality so much as the pattern of form and light.

A writer as well as an artist, Anna Cypra Oliver’s paintings have appeared along with her published essays and on the cover of The Best American Poetry 2017. Her memoir, Assembling My Father (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books), layers text, multiple strands of narrative and images, ultimately presenting a literary archeology excavated from her parents’ history and her own.