Spence Guerin

Spence Guerin lives in his hometown, Melbourne, Florida. He was a full-time resident of Alaska 1974-89 and maintains a studio fifty miles from Anchorage. A stepvan mobile studio enables him to work on location away from home for extended periods of time, as he has done from coast-to-coast. Spence Guerin works in painting, drawing and printmaking me... dia, mostly landscape , some still life , some figurative , including portraits -- working from direct observation on location. He sometimes engages in irreverent commentary (see funky ) for this disturbing yet hopeful era in American and world history that enfolds us all. AWARDS include: Academy Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters (see Award text below); Artist Fellowship Grant, Alaska State Arts Council; and Artist Fellowship Grant, National Endowment for the Arts. "Spence Guerin is a contemporary artist who brings the American nineteenth-century tradition of naturalist painting convincingly into the 21st century. Mr. Guerin paints from direct visual experience with camera-like precision. He chooses to paint scenes that are often complex, such as a Florida swamp with its juble of wild and bewildering vegetation, of which he makes structured sense. He captures the views he chooses to paint with the light and atmosphere so tangiblibly depicted that the viewer of the painting experiences a hallucinatory sense of being unexpectedly in the space of the scene. Though he is brilliant at creating the illusion of a real place, it is his strong sense of pictorial structure that makes him modern." Purchase Award, Childe Hassam Fund Purchase Exhibition, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letter, New York City (now American Academy of Arts and Letters) Purchase Award, Florida Biennial II, Florida Gulf Coast Art Center, now Gulf Coast Museum of Art, Largo FL Florida International Museum at St. Petersburg College, St. Petersburg, FL Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, FL Art from the Heart of Florida, invitational exhibition of eleven Central Florida ...Read More