Art preview: Roland Wise at Michael Donnelly Interior Design
For the first time in more than a decade, the work of Buffalo painter and professor Roland Wise is being dusted off and put on view.
The work of Wise, a former Buffalo State College professor who died in 2005, is the subject of a strange hybrid of estate sale and exhibition at 5:30 p. m. Thursday at Michael Donnelly Interior Design (1534 Hertel Ave.). Wise’s approach to painting, which often focused on interior or architectural spaces painted abstractly, with an attention to light and a bright palette, took cues from Matisse, Rembrandt and Karel Appel.
In a review of Wise’s last major show in 1994, former News critic Richard Huntington praised the artist’s careful balance between abstract art and the firm sense of location in his paintings.
“By finding so precise a place between abstraction and observation,” Huntington wrote, “Wise is able to amplify mood associated with the real world without totally relinquishing the rigor of independent form. His paintings seem to churn softly with the sweet melancholy of empty rooms while still commanding the hard silence of abstraction.”
The show runs through July 19. More information is available at 308-6520 or at www.20thcenturyfinest.com . — Colin Dabkowski
