Campay: New Paintings

Campay: New Paintings, Published by Lagerqueist Gallery, Atlanta Georgia, 2002.  Hardback, signed by the artist, approximately 150 pages.

Exerpt from the liner note by John T. Spike

Dennis Campay is a fifty-two year old painter based in Atlanta and Jacksonville. Whitewashed porticoes and weathered steps descending into cool, dark water are his recurrent images, yet his paintings are not memorials to antebellum architecture, nor is the South his subject. Campay is at ease with the Doric because it is his birthright. It is his painter's re-creation of the decayed fragments of myth-- the chaotic burden of memory -- that William Faulkner and other Southern writers immortalized.

In this first book on the artist, noted critic John T. Spike tells the story of Campay's early travails and unending apprenticeship, and concludes that none of those lessons was lost, or useless: "His age-old themes of homelessness and exile have never been more urgently felt: this is why his paintings are new.' And Spike paraphrases Faulkner to pose the question, 'Can the South's best new painter make his mark outside his Native Soil?'

Dennis Campay: New Paintings is the evidence that he is making that mark already.

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