Fred Dalkey: Illuminated Drawings

Fred Dalkey: Illuminated Drawings

September 14 – November 2, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, September 14th, 3–5pm

Paul Thiebaud Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Fred Dalkey: Illuminated Drawings on Saturday, September 14th from 3-5pm. On view will be twelve drawings executed in the red sanguine Conté that has become a hallmark of Dalkey’s works on paper. Also featured will be a selection of silverpoint drawings and a self-portrait in graphite. A technical master in applying marks to paper, each drawing of a model, still life, and portrait employs light and contrast to impart a shimmering movement to each composition. The exhibition will be on view through November 2, 2024.

With an emphasis on rendering the people and objects before him, Fred Dalkey captures each of his subjects using an atmospheric technique full of light. Highlighted in the exhibition are his classical studies of female models, a selection of still life subjects, and portraits of the artist’s close friends Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud. Of special note are a group of silverpoint drawings of still life subjects, including a baseball and tennis ball, a ball of string, a white dahlia, and a light bulb resting in front of a newspaper reproduction of Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Among the sanguine Conté drawings of models are a group of four small-scale studies that have been framed together, a composition based on the work of the 18th-century painting Jean -Antoine Watteau, and a depiction of Jane, one of his most frequently drawn subjects, reclining in an abstracted setting. Selected from the artist’s archive and covering a period of 35 years of production that includes a self-portrait from 2023, the works in the exhibition reveal the strength and consistency Dalkey displays in using technique that recalls the drawings of old masters from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Fred Dalkey grew up in Sacramento and while in high school studied painting and drawing from Abe Nussbaum, an Austrian painter trained in the old master tradition who had immigrated to the United States. Dalkey went on to earn both his BA (1966) and his MFA (1969) from California State University, Sacramento. He has received numerous awards, including the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1992, the Paul and Margaret Bertelson Prize for Graphics from the National Academy of Design in 2004, the NISOD Achievement Award in 2009, and the California Artist of the Year Award in 2009.

From 1969-2010, Fred Dalkey was a Professor of Art at Sacramento City College, and he also taught at California State University, Sacramento in the early 1970s. His works have been exhibited extensively across the United States and can be found in numerous corporate, private, and public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Crocker Art Museum; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, among others. The is Fred Dalkey’s sixth solo exhibition with Paul Thiebaud Gallery.