Annie Harris Massie: GROUNDING

Les Yeux du Monde is pleased to announce its final show of 2025: GROUNDING, an exhibition of new paintings by longtime gallery artist Annie Harris Massie, on view from November 22 through December 21. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, November 22 from 4–6 PM at the gallery.

In GROUNDING, Massie continues her decades-long exploration of light as both subject and substance, but turns more intimately inward—to the land surrounding her home and family farm in Lynchburg, Virginia. “Everything in the show is painted from places very familiar to me. Intimately familiar,” the artist reflects. “The landscape of fields and forest and garden all around our house and our family farm which I’ve known since childhood. Places I adore.”

The exhibition’s title evokes not only the physical terrain of her daily life, but also the rootedness of her artistic inquiry. Massie cites inspiration from William Carlos Williams’s concept of “the local”—how “the universal is found in the local”—and from the transcendental reflections of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who found meaning in nature and their immediate surroundings. In GROUNDING, the familiar terrain of Massie’s world becomes a meditation on the quiet intersections of place, memory, and light.

While the works remain consistent with Massie’s practice—oil on canvas and oil on panel landscapes and botanical studies—her brushwork, at once deliberate and fluid, distills fields, woodland edges, and flora into the essentials of tone and atmosphere. Light, her “ultimate subject matter,” again plays a revelatory role—shifting, obscuring, and dematerializing the world into its most elemental sensations.

Massie’s art balances the dualities of permanence and transience, materiality and immateriality. Her deft manipulation of oil paint captures what is fleeting—light at a certain hour, woodland in a certain season—while embodying it in the permanence of paint. In GROUNDING, the guiding principle is intimacy: a return home.

Born in Charlottesville and based in Lynchburg, Annie Harris Massie received her B.A. in Studio Art from Hollins College and M.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, including those of the Boar’s Head Resort, Dominion Energy, the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, and the Bank of the James. In 2025, two of her paintings were acquired by the University of Virginia for its permanent public collection—an accomplishment that underscores the significance and impact of her creative practice.