In Silver Lining, Bality turns to nature as a notion of lightness and hope, deepening his appreciation of the east coast and its variety of terrain, specifically his home state of Virginia and vacation areas in Maine, both constant muses with their range of waterscapes and rolling hills. While encompassing these various vistas, Silver Lining also presents a breadth of paintings sized from 9 x 11 inches to 6 feet in length. Bality juxtaposes his small studies alongside fully realized works, giving an intimate look into his process while connecting themes from different geographies.

Bality’s practice is based in observation—sometimes he captures scenes from life, sometimes they are spurred from snapshots in his memory and then assembled later. His plein air work begins as a pocket-sized watercolor study or drawing; driving along Interstate 81 or sitting on the beach at James River Park, Bality quickly sketches out each view in his traveling journal. Taking the roughly-drawn study back into the studio, he then reimagines the image into a 10 x 12 inch oil painting, like the ones shown in this exhibition. This intimate scale highlights the variety of marks and layering of paint in each composition through which Bality communicates a specific emotive quality. We see this in his larger format works as well, like Hayes Creek with Cows, in which quick, thin marks capture a reflective creek, while softer, green bands of paint carve out broad hills in western Virginia.

Bality’s fresh interpretations breathe movement and life into each scene, while still preserving each landscape’s dimensionality, evoking previous techniques of Impressionism, while imbibing his own abstract perspective. Addressing his approach to this body of work, he states: “the search for beauty, truth and the universality of being human – as long as one stays open, curious and positive – I believe inevitably leads to a silver lining.”