Published in the Weekly Volcano, Sept. 8, 2016
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| “Blue Stairway,” watercolor by Bill Colby, courtesy Kittredge Gallery |
Kittredge Gallery at the University of Puget
Sound kicked off the building’s 75th anniversary year with a
retrospective of works by printmaker and longtime UPS art professor Bill Colby,
who taught there from 1956 to1989.
On display are 26 works, mostly prints and a few
watercolors. The works chosen for this exhibition display a wide range of
Colby’s subject matter and style, including works from the 1950s right up to
this year.
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“Sun at Short Sands” woodcut 1956,
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Much of his early work puts me in mind of the
early Northwest School painters from the 1930s and ’40s (Mark Toby, Guy
Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves). These painters were also called
mystics, and there is much of the mystic in Colby’s prints, to be seen in his
simplification of form and in color schemes based on the dull light of the
Northwest as seen in mountains, clouds and water. Among his earlier prints are
scenes with people in interior settings, which hint at narrative without
explicitly telling stories. In later works he depicts landscape in various
degrees of abstraction, from simply stylized to almost purely symbolic or
emblematic shapes.
“East Door” is the largest piece in the show at
approximately seven feet tall. It is a simple abstraction with both Native
American and Asian influences. Near the top a stylized wreath of leaves that
encircles a cold moon. Below that is a mountain range simplified to little more
than a line of triangles, and below that larger and similarly abstracted
mountains and trees. This piece is on loan from Roger and Andrea Smith. It is restful, contemplative.
“Ravine,” a large woodcut, is one of the
strongest images in the show. It is a highly expressive landscape with broad
and energetic marks that appear to have
been gouged out with wide swipes of some kind of
trowel. Next to it is a watercolor study for the same piece that is even more
expressive, with loose and energetic brushstrokes. It’s one of my favorites,
and it exemplifies something I’ve often observed; and that is that studies for
larger works of art are often more compelling than the more “finished” pieces
due to their sheer exuberance and spontaneity.
“Quiet Time,” a black and white etching from
1965, pictures a group of women seated in what
appears to be a bar. The interior scene is done with squiggly lines and organic
shapes that are close to pure abstraction, and the women’s figures are hidden
among these shapes. It’s like a Tobey painting with peek-a-boo figures.
“Downtown Swing,” a woodcut from the same year,
depicts a scene very much like that in “Quiet Time,” but the figures are less
abstract, and the scene is anything but quiet. It is a rambunctious, rhythmical
scene of figures drinking, dancing and arguing with jazz-age exuberance.
“Blue Stairway,” a watercolor from 1965, is a
mystical and lyrical painting that I see as Colby’s take on Led Zeppelin’s
“Stairway to Heaven” (obviously not intended as such since it was painted
before the Zeppelin song was published). It is lovely, delicate, atmospheric,
and otherworldly.
The most recent picture is “Crow Watch,” a mixed
watercolor and woodcut from this year depicting a large black crow in flight
with a much smaller murder of crows on what appears to be a power line.
Bill Colby, Kittredge Gallery,
Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday noon to 5 p.m., through Sept. 24,
1500 N. Warner St., Tacoma, 253.879.3701.
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