Renowned painter Gregory Amenoff will give a lecture in the Art and Art History Department's spring lecture series Thursday, April 15, in the Konover Auditorium of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. His talk, titled "The Direct Vision," will begin at 7 p.m.

The following day, he will conduct a master class with selected UConn art students.

Amenoff is a painter of visionary landscapes. A recent body of work, grounded in the English poet/painter William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and collected in the 1997 publication the Sky Below, has been described by one critic as "an allegorical psychodrama."

Amenoff, currently based in New York, is a professor of art at Columbia University. His artistic career began in Boston, where he lived for eight years, and his work has been associated with the gestural branch of abstraction that played an important role in the history of Boston art.

He has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions and has received many awards, among them three American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Awards, three National Endowment for the Arts grants in painting, and the Louis B. Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.

His work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Amenoff's visit is cosponsored by the Institute for Teaching and Learning.