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August 15 - September 1, 2015
Opening Reception
August 15, 5 - 7 pm

» View Press Release
Ille Arts is pleased to present Summer Diaries, a solo exhibition by Billy Sullivan. Summer Diaries explores Sullivan’s ongoing process of capturing moments from his life and bringing disparate scenes together to create a lively space of pictorial and narrative conversation. In this exhibition of oil paintings and pastel drawings, 8 new works are augmented by pieces from 2011 and 1992, although one new painting revisits a morning at the Regency Hotel in 1975. Sullivan continues to expand and pore back over what one observer has called his “archive of loved ones,” a collection of analog and digital photographs begun in late ‘60s, from which he selects individual images to serve as templates for paintings, pastels, watercolors and ink drawings.

Beauty, love, and desire play back and forth between these works as formal motifs twist and echo from one picture to another. Black dogs named Leo and Red, respectively two decades apart in time, frolic on the beach or at home, their spines echoing the curve of a table set with flowers that spill out of the vase like Christian’s tousled mop of black hair. Patterns bounce from his striped shirt to Ricky in someone else’s living room, and back to the flowers set atop a San-Blas-patterned tablecloth. The beach is foggy or sunny, but the blues in the studio are deep and lush.

 Billy Sullivan