Barry Gealt, Embracing Nature

Barry Gealt's nature paintings, with their thick layers of pigment and saturated colors, evoke the drama of place—purple 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.