This month's exhibit will feature a collection of works done by the late Fuller Potter. Head to the Hoxie Gallery from 5-7 pm Wednesday, November 6th to for an opportunity to view his works and enjoy light refreshments with members of his family. His pieces can be viewed in the Hoxie Gallery through the month of November during library hours.
About the artist:
Fuller Potter (father of artist Dan Potter), was an abstract expressionist in his mid to later years, but had experimented with a range of styles, including landscape and portraiture. Fuller was renowned locally, for his art, for his eccentric ways, for his delight in people, for his explorations, and he and his wife Alice (also an artist), were part of the Stonington Community. Their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren all carry on the tradition of being artists in one medium or another. He was born in 1910, in NYC, and died in 1990 in Ledyard, CT.
Born in New York City in 1910, Potter attended St. Bernard's School in New York and Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, and lived most of his life in his Ledyard, Connecticut estate, near Old Mystic. Potter started painting in the traditional modes of representation, specializing in still life and landscape. His work was shown in New York in the 1930s at the Marie Harriman Gallery. Potter spent several of his formative years painting landscapes and portraits in the Southern Appalachia region, later studying painting in Paris with André Lhote from 1929 to 1931, and in New York with Walt Kuhn and with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1950, Potter met Jackson Pollock and changed his mode of painting permanently to abstraction, and had a number of shows of that body of work at the Mystic Gallery in Mystic, Connecticut. When starting his transition towards abstract painting, he combined his graphic skills with his mastery of color, and followed a path that would lead to his artistic peak, during his full abstract expressionist period. During the 1940s, Potter's work was still mostly figurative, but showed deliberate avoidance of ordinary representation. From the early 1950s on, Potter's style kept with the early works of Ad Reinhardt and with Jackson Pollock's 1940s pre-drip works. He painted in the "New York School" style, along with several of his contemporaries, including Franz Kline (1910–1962), Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Baziotes (1910–1963), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). He had a few shows in that style at several New England art venues. The Museum of the City of New York exhibited Potter's work along with Joan Miró and Georgia O'Keeffe in the main lobby in 1959.
