New Orleans Painter Exhibits in Southside Gallery

Carl Blackledge will exhibit new oil paintings at Southside Gallery from August 6–31

Painting by Carl Blackledge

Blackledge’s exhibition will feature fifteen Abstract Expressionist paintings, all completed over the past year.  This will be Blackledge’s first solo exhibition at Southside.

“With my paintings I’m attempting to expand a space the viewer might be occupying at that time and place. It really is an architectural pursuit. I am trying to achieve the ability to put the emotions of the viewer in a feeling of place instead of observing a place. Ideally I want the art to be perceived as the structure that is supporting the space.  Anything can serve as aesthetics in a place.  I think Motherwell explained it best when he said ‘Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses to the objects of the external world… The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life,” said Carl Blackledge.