Barry Gealt, Embracing Nature Landscape Paintings, 1988-2012 [Hardcover]

Barry Gealt's nature paintings, with their thick layers of pigment and saturated colors, evoke the drama of placepurple waves splashing over shell-pink sands, mossy rocks protruding among twisting water surfaces, the windless mists of Indiana mornings, and the hush and rustle of winter woods. This beautiful retrospective catalog presents forty of Gealt's works, mostly large oil-on-panel paintings, from 1985 through 2012. Rachel Berenson Perry traces Gealt's art-making life from his early experiments with figurative painting through the evolution of his abstract, forceful, almost sculptural landscape style. Perry also discusses Gealt's long career as a dedicated teacher and mentor to his many students in the painting program at Indiana University from 1969 until his retirement in 2007.

Atmospheric and appealing to the imagination, [Gealt's] paintings are also sensationally tactile, sculptural in their sense of modeled paint. . . . Thrilling and dramatic, they . . . remind us of the sublime and the ancient abiding in the landscape of rural Indiana and France. . . . The passion of the artist reveals the power of place; place, depicted, reflects the spirit of the artist.

Rachel Berenson Perry is Emeritus Curator of Fine Arts at the Indiana State Museum and author of T. C. Steele and the Society of Western Artists, 1896-1914 (IUP, 2009) and The Life and Work of Ada Walter Shulz.