VARNISH Fine Art
Press Contact:  Michael Page: The Turning Time
Jennifer Rogers  March 4 – April 12, 2008

Varnish Fine Art Opening Reception Thursday March 6, 6-9pm
415-222-6131  Varnish Fine Art
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The Turning Time revolves to reveal new work by Michael Page at Varnish

San Francisco, CA, February 21, 2008. The Turning Time solo show of new works in oil on wood by Michael Page opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday March 6 from 6pm to 9pm.
 
Michael Page returns to Varnish with his new series of oil paintings titled The Turning Time.  As with each series, Page begins every collection with a concept derived from our world today, but consciously moves away from any strict linear narrative by breaking up the dialogue from one painting to the next.  Page infuses each of his works with both serious issues and humor.  Although he begins with a specific concept, the artist broadens his work by allowing for a balancing depth of viewer input into the source and intervening details of the drama.   

 

Borrowing from classic allusions of good and evil, death, warriors from another land, mythological creatures and characters of the artist’s invention, each painting refers to the same concept at its heart.  The Turning Time series of paintings centers on a boy who receives power at an early age, then goes on to abuse it.  This concept-character becomes one with an intruding evil force, breaking into the realm of goodness in the painting Darkness in a Happy World.  Here we also find Page’s Dorian Gray-esque innovation of aging selected key figures across the series of paintings.  The boy is now a determined older man with an ossified heart who overshadows even Satan.  Portraying how greed and power affect us all seeps forth from the original concept of this series as seen in the The Hair Taker where young girls attempt to escape their fate as a creature out of mythology harvests their hair for his magnificent coat.  The Turning Time culminates in an ultimate battle between the happy and the dark in the oil on panel work The Last of the Giving Trees.  Here Page reveals a glimpse of a war that wages between key figures for unknown spoils and an uncertain victor.

*High-resolution images available upon request
Gallery Directors Jennifer Rogers and Kerri Stephens opened Varnish Fine Art on April 19, 2003.  Beginning with the remains of a brewery built just after the 1906 earthquake, Rogers and Stephens designed and rebuilt the space, including a main gallery, mezzanine gallery and wine bar, combining gallery with community.  

Web Site: www.varnishfineart.com
 
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