Description

Description: We offer an original oil painting by Harry Orlyk of the Cohoes Falls. The painting is 7 ¾” x 13 ⅜” and signed at the lower right. It is unframed. An inscription just below the composition reads: “School Street Station/ homes near a Cohoes power plant Sept. 4 1980.” Item #FA00202.

The tension between time and place; abstraction and representation charges Orlyk’s plein air paintings with a deep reverence for land and the artistic process itself. The water rushing over the falls is rendered with a nearly haphazard dash of the palest grey that matches the little houses along the banks of the Mohawk, while the reddish brown of the power station almost disappears into the scrubby gestures of trees.

Harry Orlyk was born in Troy New York in 1947. He studied in the Hudson Valley at the State University of New York at New Paltz and received his MFA from the University of Nebraska. He was awarded a Woods Fellowship in 1974 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. He is a prolific painter, with a near daily practice of artmaking, a discipline taught to him by well-known Lincoln painter Keith Jacobshagen. He exhibits nationally, while living and working in Salem, New York.

Condition: The canvas was rolled prematurely, when the paint wasn’t fully dry and as a result there is a small creased area in the lower left in the water. Good condition overall.