October at Arts on Douglas September 13 2025
INVERNA LOCKPEZ
The Ways of Water
On Exhibit: October 4 - November 29, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 4, 4-7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, October 24, 11 AM
CLICK TO BROWSE AND SHOP
© Inverna Lockpez, The Ways of Water III
About the Exhibition:
Inverna Lockpez has been represented by Arts on Douglas since 2018. For this, her second solo exhibition at the gallery, she will present a collection of twenty-two paintings that explore water from many perspectives. The poet, playwright, and essayist Harry Newman, Winner of the 2025 Gerald Cable Book Award in Poetry, wrote an essay accompanying this exhibition, in which he describes her work as “a contemplation of water as environment, as setting, as a point of departure. Not a thing unto itself, but a kind of process: a source of life and motion and possibility and the connections between them.”
Lockpez is known for her richly textured, gestural compositions that have a unique surface quality created by wearing down the surface of the canvas with a pumice stone to reveal color and shape combinations from multiple layers of underpainting. While her paintings for this exhibition were created one at a time, Lockpez took into account how each individual painting related to one another, and to the exhibition as a whole. Harry Newman elaborates, “The group forms almost the way ecosystems do through steady accumulation and adjustment, responding to circumstances, finding room for possibility until all expression is filled.”
This exhibition is centered around five large paintings (6’ x 4’ each) of horizons presented from different vantage points that fluctuate between abstraction and representation. From there, her work radiates through the room into thematic groupings that include depictions of boats, birds, sea, and sky, to create an immersive experience.
CLICK TO READ EXHIBITION ESSAY BY HARRY NEWMAN
© Inverna Lockpez, Snowy Egret
About the Artist:
Inverna Lockpez is a Cuban American artist. She attended medical school at the University of Havana, painting and sculpture at the National Academy of San Alejandro, and printmaking at Taller de Gravado. She arrived in New York in the late sixties where she studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Her work has been exhibited widely in more than eighty venues such as Aldrich Museum, C.W. Post College, 55 Mercer St. Gallery, Rutgers University, Hamilton College, the Kentler International Drawing Space, the John F. Kennedy Center, and others. Her work was represented in NY by Chace-Randall Gallery. She was the President of The National Association of Artists' Organization (NAAO) in 1990, the director of INTAR (International Arts Relations) Gallery in NYC for 15 years, and of The Catskill Center's Erpf Gallery and Platte A.I.R. in upstate NY for 7 years.
Lockpez received two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), two Creative Artist Public Service (CAPS) awards, two CINTAS Foundation Fellowship awards, two CETA awards, a Vogelstein Foundation award, and two grants from NY State Council on the Arts. She has published two books: "Cuba: My Revolution," and "The Noble Barn;" both available on Amazon.
