BRATTLEBORO-Paintings by local artist Doug Trump are now on exhibit at C.X. Silver Gallery, 814 Western Ave., through Sept. 26. According to the gallery's website, there will be a conversation with the artist Saturday, July 25, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Trump, born in 1950, has lived and worked in Marlboro since 2004. He has been making paintings since the late 1970s. This began after years of creative writing after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 with a bachelor's degree in religious thought.
Raised in northeast New Jersey, Trump had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a number of times and, shortly after college, had lived for months near Oslo, Norway, where he'd encountered the work of Edvard Munch. Painting began as a curiosity, though he said he soon felt a visceral attraction to the process and had an acute awareness of how physically actual a painting is.
Coinciding with this, and essential to what became the overall emerging of his art, was a 35-year employment as a yard clerk in the East Deerfield, Massachusetts, freight yard of the Boston and Maine Railroad.
"For me, the act of painting and the paintings themselves exist as one and the same," writes Trump in his artist's statement, "They engage our imaginations and emotions. They are sensuous. Though we may dress them in words, they need no explanation.
He uses oil paint, mineral spirits, linseed oil, pencils, inks and collage on canvas, paper, mat board, and wood panels to create his images. His tools include brushes, palette knives, rags and sandpaper.
"The developing image provides impulses which influence its composing. There is no plan," Trump says. "We may be enlivened and nourished by a completed painting. I am grateful for all of this."
His work has been exhibited since the early 1980s, with solo and group shows in New England and New York as well as in Atlanta and Santa Fe and on the West Coast. His paintings have been included in several regional museum exhibits. He also had a large solo exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1995.
C.X. Silver Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 8 p.m., and Sundays by appointment. For more information, contact 802-579-9008 or visit cxsilvergallery.com.
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