Published in the Weekly Volcano, June 4, 2015
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| "Lafawnda’s Cancan” oil and copper on canvas by Laura Hanan. Photo courtesy the artist |
It makes my heart happy to see that Laura Hanan has
re-opened Brick & Mortar Gallery.
The once funky little gallery on Pacific at 9th street is now
elegant and welcoming and in business again after a hiatus of six years with a
selection of Hanan’s paintings plus porcelain wall reliefs by Steve Portteus and
steel sculptures by Josh Lippencott.
Both
Lippencott and Portteus are showing work that is gift-shoppy and appealing to
popular taste but finely crafted and, particularly in the work of Portteus,
original in concept. By way of contrast, there is absolutely nothing
gift-shoppy in Hanan’s paintings. They pure, bold and unpretentious. They are
abstract oil paintings on canvas based on an image of a workbench, a photo of
which is projected onto the wall of the gallery.
“My new paintings were inspired by minimal marks left in construction environments such as the stains and scars on a carpenter’s workbench and the paint-splatter left on sidewalk public works barrels,” Hanan said. “The intrinsic beauty in these random marks, textures, contrast, and earth/mineral tones motivated creations of strange, otherworldly
landscapes and creatures.”
Many
of her paintings have one or two circular discs made from copper and glued to
the surface of the canvas amidst loosely painted organic shapes applied in
washes so thin as to soak in and show the weave of the canvas. In contrast to
the Helen Frankenthaler-like washes of color are the hard circles and black
shapes layered on with thick paint that looks like hot tar. The contrasts of
these divergent forms and methods of paint application is bold and startling,
yet the different shapes and surfaces blend together into a single whole. This
is painting that is gritty, raw and accomplished.
The
paintings look spontaneous and quickly done, but Hanan confirmed that some of
them were re-worked extensively.
Viewers
should be able to easily read landscape into her forms, and they may also see
reflections of grease and oil and tar soaked into concrete or brick or the
surface of the afore-mentioned work bench.
I
like all of her paintings, but if asked to pick a favorite it would be
“Cryptonic Crusades,” which has a black shape in the center perched atop a
white shape. It looks like a black bear on a floating chunk of ice, like a
scene of melting ice in the arctic but with a stranded black bear instead of the
expected polar bear.
Lippencott’s
welded flower sculptures and cut-steel landscapes are technically well done but
not original in thought or execution. His two standing steel sculptures are by
far his best works in the show.
Portteus’s
relief sculptures of landscapes and flowers are quite attractive. The most
interesting aspect of his work is the use of little multi-colored balls of clay
arranged into fields of color.
“Daisy”
is a single flower with white petals and a yellow center on a field of blue,
green and olive balls. It has a pop-art sensibility that is refreshing. His
best works are “Tide Pool #1” and “High Tide.” The former is a tide pool
created from clear epoxy at least an inch deep with star fish and flowers
floating on the water and a crab clinging to the rocks. The latter is a field
of large clay balls partially submerged in clear epoxy. It is the most abstract
of his pieces. It is astonishingly beautiful.
Paint, Steel Porcelain,
Tues. and Thurs. 20 a.m. to 2 p.m., Fri.-Sat., noon to 9 p.m. through June 15,
Brick & Mortar Gallery, 811 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, 253.591.2727.
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