Michael Economos: The New York Years Versus the Maryland Years

Through Dec. 19 at MICA's Pinkard Gallery

Don’t let the simple title mislead you: Michael Economos’ The New York Years Versus the Maryland Years is an intensely personal exhibition, but you might not get the entire breadth of that intimacy from the paintings alone. A MICA professor of painting and drawing since 1964, Economos hangs seven “New York” paintings with 11 “Baltimore” paintings (some from a single series) for this small show that charts his evolving creative interests. What they share is his exquisite craftsmanship—he’s got a great eye and hand for figurative realism—and an interesting tension between representational control and gestural expression. Visually alone, Versus offers the revealing opportunity to drink in one artist’s painterly concerns cherry-picked from a roughly 40-year time span. Read the essays in the exhibition’s accompanying brochure—a short introduction from Economos himself and a descriptive appreciation from his friend and co-worker, MICA Professor Emeritus Paul Moscatt—and you get a candid glimpse of the life experiences that informed the artist creating these paintings.

The paintings occupy the ground floor Pinkard Gallery/lobby of MICA’s Bunting Center, which makes it a little too easy to pass them quickly and only catch the superficial ways in which the two eras differ. Judging by painting dates alone, Economos lived in New York City for about 10 years in the early to late 1970s, moving to Baltimore after that. The works reflect their different locales in subject matter and palette: Many of the New York paintings feature some items almost entirely obscured by blades of grass, as if litter tossed into an abandoned city lot, while the Maryland paintings reflect a closeness and familiarity with water: people swimming in crisp blue pools or slightly muddy-looking swimming holes.

The personal biography revealed in Economos’ and Moscatt’s essays lends a narrative context to these first impressions, enough so that it’s worth picking up one of the brochures to read and then making a return visit. Economos writes about wanting to do something different from the New York art world he saw around him while he lived there, and that moving to Maryland and becoming more curious about the Chesapeake Bay led to the purchase of a sailboat and his use of swimmers as a recurring motif. Moscatt discusses his friend’s technique, how relationships affected his interest in the human figure over time, and how his paintings’ tones have subtly changed. These casual, candid accounts provide enough insight into the man behind the paintings to encourage a closer consideration, and a slower inspection of Economos’ work offers an eccentric friction between his ability to depict objects with a high level of photorealistic detail and an almost obsessive desire to distort that competence with expressive painterly emotion.

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