artist work

ERNIE BYNUM

Paintings

Exhibition dates:

Friday July 3 thru Thursday July 9 2009

Opening Reception Friday July 3 7 - 9 PM

Provincetown Magazine

Ernie Byum speaks in the lushness of color. Like an alchemist at work, he creates a new vocabulary that expresses his internal life force. As he applies layer upon layer of paint, he creates work that is reductive in imagery, yet expansive and dynamic in its depth of color. Within that color, a whole dream-like world resonates with inner life and inner light, drawing the viewer through the plane into its deep essence of spirit and color. Each painting originates in the intersection of psychological and literal landscapes.

Art New England
2009
"ERNDEN FINE ART's season included...Ernie Bynum, an exceptional colorist. The masts of sailboars and the many pilings of the wharves, seen from a distance, shimmer with mystery, emotion, and radiance."

Chris Busa

Provincetown Arts
2007
"Ernie Bynum-The Wharf Series. Something of deep love from past time is present in the experience of his paintings of wharves, with their wooden pilings pounde firmly into foundations of sand and water. Warmth and emotion emanates from the bright colors that bathe wharves witnesses from a distance, not only in Provincetown, but in coastal Connecticut where he grew up nad in New York City along the East and Hudson Rivers. During a recent visit to West Africa, Bynum observed the old wharves and pylons in Mali. He realized that each wharf from a different culture displayed a commonality of funtion...to generate income. The sea was the hunting ground and the prize was the fishs brought into the dock. Bynum's palette holds the secret to his use of brilliant and explosive colors. He formulates his ideas from his subconscious mind and let his palette knife and brush create the images. In some newer pieces from this series, figuration is becoming less obvious. In earlier work the horizon line is often clear between land, water and sky. ow the sharp demarcation is lost in reflections. Colors seem bent as if passing through the refraction of water."

Cape Arts Review
by Andre Van Der Wende
2009
With an arresting collusion of serendipity, subconscious will, and innate control, he chooses a predominant color that sets the tone of the painting--a dense rush of blue or the warm spread of yellow that seeps into all corners of the canvas. Within this sea of color, objects submerge and emerge from a haze, half realized as they float within a nebulous foggy grip of pure color.

Bynum thrives upon suggestion, working with the idea that revealing a little suggests a whole: the flight contour of a skiff; the roofline from several cottages; a pulse of contrasting color for a bird; long blocks of robust color that stand in for buildings or the heavy footing of a wharf, but also function to give a composition density and anchorage.

Creating images that continue to move in the direction of total reduction, Ernie Bynum works slowly and diligently to create a clear articulation of figuration, imagery, and blocks of color. Bynum spends hours on end in his studio in New York City applying, scraping, reapplying and scraping again until he is satisfied the image he has developed is pleasing to his eye. His process stretches over long periods, sometimes years, and even then, he is not certain he is ready to release his work. Bynum says, "I have a relationship with my work and everyday I have to face challenges with my work until I feel I have taken each piece to its ultimate, and even then I am never completely satisfied."

Trained as a classical painter at the Art Students League in New York City, Bynum was engaged in an intensive and rigorous curriculum for five years. It was here Bynum began to discover his singular voice through color and form. He is a modernist painter whose medium and style depict the universality of his work.

His palette is a kaleidescope of brilliant yellows, lime green, rich umbers, black, vivid red, blue, orange, pink and periwinkle. He creates images that resonate with warmth and sensitivity as well as peacefulness and tranquility. "My whole purpose is to create paintings that, through the use of color, reflect my internal and personal images of the places where I have lived and loved."  

The richness of these 'places'-the color and air and light, the culture, the historic echoes-is transformed into color saturated paintings that speak of Bynum's early childhood at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. There he was able to watch the changes in the color, not only in the sky, but also in the pine trees when by early morning light the dew on the pines resonated with a silvery shimmer, which later turned into a brilliant blue/green. When his family moved to Connecticut he was introduced to the light of the Long Island Sound and later to Cape Cod. Here the sky reflected off water, whereas in North Carolina the sky reflected off the earth. 

As an adult Bynum has lived in Taos, New Mexico, Saba, Netherlands Antilles, San Juan, Puerto Rico and New York City, all places where light became his guide. He has also visited and spent time in Europe and made a 6 week trip to Mali, West Africa where he experienced the warm and tender sun setting (and moon rising) over the River Niger. "For me, the beauty of nature is what it's all about. Trying to recreate nature doesn't work, but to be in touch with nature and to let my creative energy flow with nature is what I attempt to accomplish in my paintings." 

It is the simplicity of his composition that draws people into his work. The clarity he creates generates one idea after the other, as he continues to make paintings that are both compositionally balanced and dynamic. "I never go to my easel and say, 'I'm going to paint this or that today.' What happens to me is that the subconscious begins to speak and I let the brush and palette knife do the rest of the work. Of course I am concerned about the end product and about a compositionally correct painting, but as for imagery, that just happens on its own."

Bynum completed his undergraduate studies and received his BS degree from Fordham University in New York City. He concluded his graduate studies at the University of Chicago graduating Cum Laude with an MA degree. Priot to painting full time Bynum was a psychotherapist.

Bynum's work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in Provincetown, New York City, Taos, New Mexico, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Saba, Netherlands Antilles. His paintings are in private collections throughout the USA, in the Caribbean and Europe.

ERNDEN FINE ART GALLERY is pleased to represent Ernie Bynum whose work will be exhibited in the gallery throughout the season. For more information contact Dennis Costin, Gallery Director at 508-487-6700 or 888-304-ARTS, or via email at erndengallery@att.net