Original artist featured on ‘Third Friday’

Dennis Tawes can be found almost every day painting in his Millville studio behind the cavernous Amethyst Gallery on 212 N. High Street, where he is House Artist.
His paintings are marked by a sardonic wit and a Neo-Expressionistic treatment of the human figure and the painted spaces it inhabits.
Self-educated, Tawes has absorbed artistic influences central to modernart history to paint his “dream stories”—Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, and Van Gogh.
He counts, among the earliest influences on his painting, the caricatures of Al Hirschfeld and Mad Magazine. And while the powerful black line is still apparent in some of Tawes’ mature work, his art has advanced dramatically since the beginning of his career, drawing caricatures of tourists at Missouri’s Branson theme park.
Tawes was the first artist to settle in Glasstown. While exhibiting paintings in New York’s incubator of avant-garde art, Soho, he heard rumors that an arts district was being built to boost Millville’s ailing retail and smokestack economy.
He is philosophical about his pioneer status, noting that he would have made art anywhere he settled. But he admits that his work has been shaped, in part, by what he sees around him—especially his fellow artists.
Forms & Still Lifes—Tawes’ recent work—can be seen on Third Friday, October 16, at Amethyst Gallery in Millville’s Glasstown Arts District.
Musician Steve Byrne will perform “the lost blues of yesteryear,” and as always during a Third Friday at Amethyst dinner will be served.
If you miss the October 16 show, Tawes will exhibit a new series, This & That and Bits of Millville in November and December at Bogart’s Books, 210 N. High Street in the Millville Arts District.
For details, contact tawesart@gmail.com.
Dennis Tawes’ art and philosophy can be experienced on the web at: UTube.com/mrtawes or at www.fineartamerica.com (search for Tawes).