By Thomas Broadbent
Located in New York, NY
This large scale watercolor painting depicts an astronaut floating in space. The cosmos and stars of outer-space reflect in his visor. A beautiful and masterfully detailed painting, this piece is perfect for contemplation and a gives a feeling of relaxation. Framed in a shadowbox frame, the watercolor painting 40"x60", is presented in a high quality wooden white finish frame, framed dimensions: 51.5x74.5
This painting is featured currently at the Front Room Gallery in a solo exhibition of works by Thomas Broadbent, entitled: Macrocosm
The Front Room Gallery is proud to present, “Macrocosm” a solo exhibition of new large-scale watercolor paintings and sculpture by Thomas Broadbent. This is Broadbent’s fourth solo exhibition at Front Room Gallery.
The Paintings in this exhibition probe into the human impulse for exploration. Broadbent has carefully selected and analyzed subjects that remind us of humankind’s scale and position in the universe. And while our perception of the cosmos is informed by the data and images gathered by satellites, telescopes and manned missions; the moon, planets and stars, still seem to be objects of our imagination. It is these astronomical bodies and the impulse to map them that has inspired the new works in Thomas Broadbent’s exhibition, “Macrocosm”
Thomas Broadbent presents his compositions from a naturalist point of view; his visual depictions adhere to the natural laws that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe. These works have a photo-realistic quality to them: the object based works often have a trompe l’oeil effect, while the large scale works are visually immersive in their detail. At over 11 feet in length, Broadbent’s “Andromeda” galaxy painting captures the spectacle and wonder one feels when looking at the stars in the night sky. In this enormous painting, Broadbent’s absolute blackness of the space contrasts with the vibrant points of lights emanating from each star’s a warm bright white. Broadbent’s accurate depiction of the spiral galaxy is poignant because, while Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, it is also is the most distant object in the sky that mankind can see unaided from the Earth.
In this exhibition, Broadbent juxtaposes the grandeur of space with the fragility of humankind and our attempts to explore and understand. The apparatuses for space travel are presented as isolated objects in Broadbent’s paintings and act as a metaphor for expansion of knowledge and quest for adventure. Broadbent references early technologies and methods of space exploration with a reverence and a point of nostalgia. In his Lunar Mosaic paintings, he applies the same photo-mosaic tiling technique that was used by technicians of the early lunar probes. Yet, instead of individual photographs, each panel is a photo-realistic watercolor painting. In “White Noise...
Category
2010s Contemporary Thomas Broadbent Figurative Paintings
MaterialsWatercolor, Archival Paper