Shaped Canvas & Wood - Garthwaite's brushwork brings together the traditions of the Abstract Expressionist movement and Color Field painting. Working in Soho during the seventies, he developed a new format that merged the two dimensions of canvas into sculptural three dimensional wood forms This signature style uses brushstrokes of color-hued layers of light passages while drawing upon abstraction, color field painting, and layering of surfaces to enhance the feeling of movement. These works often require Garthwaite to work on paintings for years at a time to develop the surface, texture, and feeling of an inner light imbued by each work.
Birches - In the Birches and in the Ice paintings lost mythical, spiritual, and animalistic forms emerge. These paintings on convex wood and canvas shapes bring together sculptural forms onto the surface of the piece melding into the wall, the architecture, and surroundings. These works pay homage to the land, the Native people, and the rituals of the past.
Ice - Creating monuments for viewers to meditate on, even as these landmasses change in front of us these large parabolic canvases capture glacial scale, form, and depth. Drawing on his deep technical expertise Garthwaite combines acrylic staining and non-objective abstractions on these large-scale canvases. He blends the physical surface of the paint with the object of ice, enabling the viewer to meditate on subject matter larger than us. The Ice paintings represent the meltdown of our Arctic zones, reminders that all is moving, melting, merging. Garthwaite calls out for the technology to get aboard with the global necessity of reinforcing our contemporary world. We must reexamine, reinvent, and reimagine our ways of creating sustainable land-water-ice connections.
Land On The Wing - Pastel studies shown here are of large-scale shaped canvases where the full scale works range up to 18 feet and are held in private collections. Experimenting with color-tonal craft, brushstrokes and shaped canvas, these acrylic stained canvases take on a new form. These unique surfaces along with the parabolic shaped canvases create movement in the paint as the viewer walks by the surface of the work.
Parabolic Canvas - A Signature form developed in the 1970s by Garthwaite to create new ways of experiencing light in painting and sculpture and merging the forms together. This work continues today in series like the Ganesh paintings towering up to six feet by four feet, immersing the viewer in a color field with non-objective forms that merge with organic shape, material and gold leaf.
