The Church in Sag Harbor will host artist and co-founder April Gornik, who will speak on her painting, “Storm Suspended by Light,” currently featured in the “Empire of Water” exhibition. Gornik will speak at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 28, at 11 a.m. and her landscape shows the sun setting over the water as storm clouds roll in. The piece contradicts the stereotypical depiction of water as blue and instead highlights water as a reflective medium — mirroring the orange sky with an orange sea. The painting is scaled at 78 x 108 inches allowing the viewer to be immersed in the moment, sunsets are fleeting, however through her painterly expertise Gornik captures the overwhelming serenity that an East End sunset encompasses.
Robert Becker, who reviewed Gornik’s 2020 solo show at Miles McEnery Gallery in Artforum, wrote: “Scaled exactly so the mind can take in the composition all at once, each work is charged by an uncanny celestial radiance: the pleasure of Gornik’s art is in its immediate transcendent affect. The canvases are ecstatic experiences … yet they recall the haunting psychological directness of Mark Rothko’s stacked rectangles far more than Frederic Edwin Church’s grandiose, metaphor-laden fictions.”
Tickets for April Gornik’s talk are $15. The Church is at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor. For details visit thechurchsagharbor.org.