‘Then and Now’: Paintings by David Storey

To celebrate and acknowledge the retirement of visual arts professor David Storey, this exhibition displays work made during Storey’s 20-year tenure at Fordham. There will be a reception for the exhibition on December 16th at 6 p.m. in the Butler Gallery.

“Then and Now” Artist’s Statement

These paintings in the Butler Gallery coincide with my retirement and present a mixture of my current work and a varied group of paintings I made during the years spent teaching visual arts at Fordham. The mixture of new and old paintings in the studio serve to document changes in terms of the juncture between abstraction and image, my techniques and issues of style and scale. In many ways this is the model of the individual and group progression in a visual arts studio class.

I believe that all of us are working to see something we’ve never seen before.

In an artist’s working art studio, there are always paintings that, for a variety of reasons, get stacked behind other paintings, but are still definitely a presence and quietly in view.

These stored paintings add to the familiar and comfortable atmosphere of the working space while also being a quietly tangible documentation of the progress of all new paintings on the easel.

Half of this group of paintings in the gallery are current works. The other paintings are from mixed years during the time that I was teaching at Fordham.

I was learning as I was teaching.—David Storey