Inner Gardens

Opening Friday, April 4, 2003, the Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts presents two new exhibitions: Inner Gardens, an elegant series of landscape paintings by Deborah Morrissey-McGoff that reflects on personal space and our intricate relationship with the natural world; and Paintings by Jim Wainscott, a survey of the artist’s meticulously painted enigmatic figurative and landscape paintings.

Long regarded as a versatile and technically superlative painter, Deborah Morrissey-McGoff (Cincinnati), combines traditional painting techniques and art historical references to landscape with contemporary narrative themes. For her exhibition, Inner Gardens, she will present a series of oil paintings on wood panels and works on paper that explore personal narratives within evocative landscape settings. Exquisitely executed, these paintings pay homage to artists who span centuries of landscape painting from the Italian Renaissance to the Hudson River School. Inner Gardens continues this tradition with works completed in the past ten years up through the debut of a new series of paintings focused on garden settings that for the artist represents sanctuary in an increasingly expanding urban environment.

Deborah Morrissey-McGoff earned a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Cincinnati in 1977. Since that time she has developed an extensive exhibition history that includes both regional and national venues. A major exhibition of her paintings was presented at the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, Ohio in 1997. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in 1991 and 1996, an Arts Midwest Fellowship in 1990, and a Summerfair Individual Artist Grant in 1984 and 1992. Her paintings are represented in major private and corporate collections.