PRESS
"Brock embeds words pertaining to the manifestations of climate change in the Catskill ecosystem where he lives....The resulting images are a hybrid of Monet’s 'Water Lilies' and Ed Ruscha’s mystical-pop word art—optical and mercurial....These are messages that we read with our bodies, not just our eyes. The textural experience of the works evokes the expanded awareness of walking in the woods where the colors, patterns, and complexity of the ecosystem are everywhere and within us."
Alexandra Hammond, The Brooklyn Rail, on “Hovey Brock, Daniela Dooling, Valerie Hagerty,” 2024
“These words are rooted in the psychological toll the climate crisis began to take on me. This project began as a diary of my reaction to two successive 100-year floods in 2011 and 2012 on the West Branch of the Neversink, a river that I grew up on. That experience gave me a taste of what it feels like to live through the chaos of accelerating global warming.”
Hovey Brock, Art Spiel Interview “Hovey Brock-Daniela Dooling-Valerie Hegarty at Catskill Art Space,” 2024
“Hovey Brock’s Crazy River is a call for awareness of the environmental degradation the artist has witnessed in Frost Valley and the West Branch of the Neversink River in Ulster County, NY…The work is created by scraping layers of acrylic paint over the painted words and the mesh again and again. The process mirrors the artists own obsessive internal dialogue and frequent conversations with his peers over the topic of the climate crisis.”
Sullivan County Democrat, “Catskill Art Space introduces new exhibits at Catskill Art Space,” 2024
“The act of painting has led me into states of mind very different from ordinary awareness. My takeaway from these incidents is that language and culture, while essential as the foundations for civilization, also act as screens that hide the reality that humanity is a fragment embedded in a gigantic whole that includes all living things and the inanimate world.”
Hovey Brock, Art Spiel Interview “Hovey Brock: Crazy River,” 2022
"The works on display use their palettes to suggest—indirectly, as if by allusion—perspective, distance, even motion. The results are mixed, but often promising....Hovey Brock’s misty landscapes of purple and red have a gradient of lighter and darker patches which provide the illusion of depth."
John Michael Colon, The Brooklyn Rail, on “Between the Color, Site: Brooklyn,” 2018
"In Hovey Brock’s delicate watercolor (2001), an aggregate is comprised of faintly tinted dots; each varies in degrees of translucency against their bright white background."
Marilyn Symmes, Guest Curator, Degrees of Density: Selections from the Kentler Flatfiles, the Illges Gallery, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA, 2010
"Hovey Brock's dreamy yet intense painting "The Pitch" seemed to want to be next to White's hallucinogenic works on paper, each holding their own while being strangely complementary."
Katarina Wong, The "O!" Show, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY, 2009
“Toy[s] with the viewer’s perceptual expectation of a figure/ground distinction…. Brock’s gorgeous traces of light and color in watercolor washes play with line….[and] seem to define a form while the line itself teeters on the ephemeral.”
Carter Foster, Guest Curator and Curator of Drawings, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Figure?Ground, Kentler International Drawing Space, 2006
"These paintings have a magical, peekaboo quality..."
Carl Blumenthal, Brooklyn Journal, on “4SIGHT: From Realism to Abstraction Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn,” 2002
“This extraordinarily satisfying show of recent abstract painting…presents a dozen artists who variously and inventively cultivate four possibilities: crisp or blurry edges, and rigid or loopy shapes….Hovey Brock conjures ghostly swirls of pale line.”
Ken Johnson, The New York Times, on “The Hard and the Soft, Thomas Korzelius,” 2001
“Mr. Brock makes large, loopy watercolors of captivating subtlety. Using a wide brush and diluted paint on off-white panels or paper, he traces circulating, linear arabesques over and over, creating shimmering entanglements that seem to hover in space like knots of cosmic or submolecular energy."
Ken Johnson, The New York Times, on “Hovey Brock: New Paintings, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art,” 2000
"Brock does with time what David Hockney often does with space--the presentation of numerous views simultaneously....[his] abstract forms allow him to explore pure motion, as subject matter, undiluted with narrative references….You can almost believe that if you look away for a few minutes and then look back, the action will have migrated to a different place on the ground.”
Joseph Walentiny, Abstract Art Online, on “Hovey Brock: New Paintings, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art,” 2000