The Early Years
In 1947, Colin's first exhibit was an ink drawing at the Fogg Museum of Art while a student at Harvard. After a three year foray into business, he quit his job to attend Columbia University School and Painting and Sculpture from 1951-53, studying painting and sculpture under Professors Peppino Mangravite, Oronzio Maldarelli, and others. By 1960 he began creating seven foot black and white "Drawing-Paintings" on paper in which light was a predominant element. Those works marked the visual crystalization of his concept of the universlity of natural forms and for Colin, stood as proof of man's relationship to nature; a theme that would carry on through all of his future work.
"...the best and most authentic use of abstraction there is."
The Washington Post & Times Herald Tribune, 1955
"...extraordinarily delicate and luminous effects...a sense of light and envelopment..."
Washington Post, 1960
From the Jefferson Place Gallery Exhibition Catalog:
The if of the empty paper-canvas
the if of the first stroke
the if of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th
The (F)ACT of the last touch:
The whole emerged.
The sum that sparks kinship,
general or specific,
within the total reservoir
of heart-felt-seen experience.
Affinity.
By Colin Greenly, 1960
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