To Each Their Own at Thompson Giroux Gallery presents six artists with mature careers and deep bodies of work—consummate professionals making the kind of rich, nuanced work that only comes after years of intense focus and effort.

In Steven Careau’s studio, raw materials are given time and respectful attention; it may be years before a piece reveals itself to him.  The careful choices he makes result in a negotiated tension—his wall sculptures are weighty and fixed, but the eye travelling along them creates motion, pattern, and lightness while taking in elements deliberate and accidental, decayed and preserved, tactile and cerebral.

Frank Curran moves between painting and printmaking; his work is often observational and here he is showing figurative woodcuts. His use of traditional methods and equipment enable his assured lines, mastery of light and shadow, and sensitivity to mood and emotion to shine, bringing a vibrant immediacy to his simple subject matter.

Multimedia artist Kingsley Parker has long been concerned with our human need to make sense of—and ultimately control—the world.  Incorporating his own iconic motifs with references to maps and science, Parker’s narrative of form is a subtle but provocative invitation to consider our beliefs about knowledge, progress, culture, conquest, and faith.

Bart Gulley and Hideyo Okamura are abstract painters. Gulley sets up analytical relationships on his canvases and then allows the formal juxtapositions to interact; the hints of rough edges and expressionism add elements of surprise and chance.  In contrast, Okamura’s work is wildly expressionistic—bright, colorful marks are repeated and layered in endless loops, painting as music.

Painter Joseph Yetto’s meticulous still-lifes capture the present moment while documenting the past— the process of observing and painting his commonplace subjects as they decay and disintegrate often leads him to scrape off previous iterations and begin again on the same canvas. Obsessive and largely invisible to the viewer, it’s a method that yields an unsettling, experiential hyper-reality.

Over the course of their careers each artist here has stayed true to their individual vision, engaged in the lifelong process of honing skills and technique while continuing to explore new ways of expression—to each their own.