Bare-bones painting

Break O' Day" A painting by Susan Christian 

on display at Childhood's End Gallery. 

Photo courtesy Childhood's End Gallery

Susan Christian at Childhood’s End Gallery
The Weekly Volcano, July 6, 2011
I've been keeping up with Susan Christian's career for more than 20 years, and during that time I have watched her art change so gradually that it's like watching a mountain grow. I think she has finally reached her maturity as a painter. Her latest works - simple, bare-bones, abstract paintings of doorways and windows and corners of starkly empty rooms - are by far the best I have seen from her yet. They are now on display, along with brass and copper sculptures by Ron Hinton, at Childhood's End Gallery.

Also on display from Christian are a number of other paintings of curtains from a couple years back - odd little paintings of edges of curtains, some placed at extreme distances on either end of absurdly long canvases and others in conjunction with, in one painting, a pair of cut-off legs, and in another a window opened to a view of a black sea and a peach colored sky. These two are the best of the curtain paintings. The long paintings with so much space between the curtains are uncomfortable to look at because the viewer is forced to mentally connect objects that are too far apart in the painting to be part of a single composition. I don't know if that is the intention or not, but it doesn't work for me.

But the sparse interior scenes of windows and doors work wonderfully. They affect me in the way of an Edward Hopper painting or an Adolph Gottlieb or a Barnett Newman. They are minimalist to an extreme, in some cases no more than two flat rectangles centered in white space. But they offer mystery, a sense of deep spirituality, a playfulness of spatial relationships and a consummate artist's sensitivity to paint handling and awareness of edge.

This last quality, awareness of edge, is something I've come to associate with maturity as an artist. It is something artists develop only after years of work, and it's something I seldom saw in Christian's work prior to this latest series of paintings.

"The Upside of Loss" and "The Morning" each picture a flat rectangle that seems to be standing upright on an invisible ground with its shadow or another rectangle of a different color on a different plane jutting outward underneath it. In one of them there is the most subtle of hints of a line indicating the junction of floor and wall, as if the upright rectangle is standing against a wall and its reflection is on the floor. Paint is applied in a variety of ways within the parts of these pictures. Flat here, brushy there, scumbled and scraped in one area and liquid and mottled in another area.

"The Wound" and "Chagrin D'Amour" are pictures of partially opened doorways painted on dark backgrounds with hints of reflections as if they are standing on glass. These are portals to nowhere, mysterious doorways to infinity afloat in space. In these paintings the colors are darker and slightly heavier than in the others.

One of the best is "The Squirrel," an abstract painting of a part of a wall and floor with wonderfully scumbled white-on-white paint application.

The variations of hue and value, and contrasts of paint application and edge are so subtle in these paintings that they have to be seen in person and studied carefully to be appreciated.

Ron Hinton's sculptures are small etched brass and copper pieces with angular planes of metal and decorative surface etchings. They are well constructed but seem to me like studies rather than finished work. They look like they should be much larger and the surface decoration, while interesting in itself, seems superfluous.

through July 24, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday–Saturday
11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday
Childhood’s End Gallery
222 Fourth Ave. W., Olympia
360.943.3724

The TAM tour

Photo courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

Published in the Weekly Volcano blog Spew, July 5, 2011

I went to a gallery tour Q&A with Dale Chihuly at Tacoma Art Museum Thursday morning, and while I enjoyed the Q&A with Tacoma's most famous artist, the things that really knocked me out were 1) Chihuly's collection of Edward S. Curtis photographs, 2) the two Willits canoes suspended from the ceiling (much more impressive than the silly cars hanging from the ceiling of the Seattle Art Museum, 3) the Virna Haffer exhibition in the adjacent gallery, and 4) a huge painting (untitled) by William Ivey in the Safeco collection exhibition.

I've got to get back to TAM. There was not enough time Thursday to see all the wonderful art on display. There are three new shows at TAM, and one of them - Chihuly's - takes up all of two large galleries. This is a mind-blowing amount of art all in one place.

Readers who have followed my columns over the years know I have mixed feelings about Chihuly. He's like the nursery rhyme girl. When he's good, he's very, very good. And when he's bad he's horrid. There's a lot of both in this show. Among the best things are the surface decoration (essentially abstract expressionist paintings) on many of his blown glass baskets and cylinders. And did you know he is an avid collector of just about everything from Native American crafts to bottle caps? He shares large chunks of his collection in this show, including one huge wall of Pendleton blankets and another entire wall of Curtis photographs. And all of it is beautifully and tastefully displayed - kudos to curator Rock Hushka and his team for a great job.

If Chihuly is Tacoma's most famous artist, Virna Haffer is our least known. "Virna Haffer has been an all too well kept Tacoma secret," said museum director Stephanie A. Stebich. From the 1920s until her death in 1974 she was one of America's leading and most inventive modern photographers; yet she has somehow been lost to history. I for one am overjoyed that TAM has searched out a large sampling of her work for this show.

Haffer brings to mind the great Man Ray. She's that relentlessly innovative. Her surrealistic imagery and experimental distortions of figures and scenes are both daring and aesthetically pleasing. On display are works representing an amazing range of experimentation from overlapping images and strange viewpoints and even photos done without a camera in a process called the photogram (the same process Man Ray called a Rayogram). "Her artistic curiosity is palpable in her work, which in itself is staggering in its volume, diversity and range," said curator Margaret Bullock.

Finally, there is the exhibition from the Safeco collection featuring some 400 works by Northwest artists donated by Safeco Insurance. Included are works from established giants the likes of Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan and Morris Graves and more contemporary stars such as Michael Brophy and Michael Spafford. Is this the best collection anywhere of Northwest art? I don't know. If it's not it certainly runs a close second to anything else. The big painting by Ivey that I mentioned in the opening paragraph is one of the most impressive abstract paintings I've seen in a long time.

Who remembers Malcolm Ashton

Notes on a work in progress

Who remembers Malcolm Ashton and Sonny Staples from The Backside of Nowhere? Probably very few people who read the book remember them. People who attended the reading of the screenplay are probably scratching their heads and saying "Malcolm who?" They were such minor characters. They were completely left out of the screenplay. But like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in "Hamlet" they're going to emerge as major characters in the sequel -- not that I would dare be so audacious as to compare my writing to Shakespeare or Stoppard.

In the flood scene early in Backside they are the two would-be crooks who loot the electronics store and are caught, humiliated and scared shitless by Pop Lawrence. (More head scratching; the flood scene wasn't in the screenplay either.)

Sonny never shows up again but Malcolm is mentioned in two paragraphs at the end. First in a scene leading up to the hurricane:

Inside the closed and boarded-up Piggly Wiggly store in Freedom, Malcolm Ashton hunkers down in the employee’s lounge with one other employee, Fred Dalton, his supervisor. They are armed with shotguns and are prepared to fend off looters. From their position inside they can hear the constant battering of wind and rain outside. Malcolm is cold. His hands are shaking. He keeps glancing Fred’s way, trying to ascertain if his boss can tell he’s scared. He wouldn’t want to be thought a coward. Fred has not noticed Malcolm’s nervousness but would not think badly of him if he did. And he would not believe it if someone told him that twenty-five years earlier Malcolm had been one of the young hoodlums who looted the town during a flood. After that, Malcolm had been caught holding up a 7-Eleven and spent five months in a juvenile detention center, and two years after that he had spent time in the penitentiary farm up north in Parchman for robbing a gas station and had gone through a twelve-step program for drug addiction. Finally clean and sober, he got a job as a stock boy at the Piggly Wiggly and married Bitsy Gardner and had three children, and has remained responsible and out of trouble ever since.

And then after the storm:

Like soldiers surveying a battlefield after the fighting’s done, as soldiers did back when wars were fought with handheld weapons, they survey all around from their slight height advantage. The Lawrence store still stands across the street. The awning has blown away and the front windows are shattered, but the building is mostly intact. They see figures slowly emerge from inside the store and head their way. There are four of them, a man, another man, and a couple holding on to each other. David thinks they look like movie zombies. 

“Look, there’s people,” Shelly says.

They understand that the Lawrence store would be the place survivors would naturally gravitate to. 

“That’s Raymond Jenkins,” Randy says.

Mary says, “And Mr. and Mrs. Short.”

From far to the north two more people trudge their way. Randy identifies them as Malcolm Ashton and Fred Dalton. The battlefield may not be littered with corpses, but the survivors are shell shocked.
They have lain Pop on the ground. 

As the others gather round, Malcolm says, “Is he dead?”

“Yep,” Randy answers.

“That’s a shame. He coulda kilt me once when he had a right to, but he let me go.”

The sequel, Return to Freedom, takes up where Backside ended. The town is rebuilt and Sonny and Malcolm and their families move into the new condos built by David Lawrence, along with another character, Beulah, who was also a minor character in Backside. Sonny has supposedly seen Jesus and changed his sinful ways. He's an itenerant preacher with a clueless wife and a thing for young girls. Malcolm and his wife are decent people, but their family is falling apart because they don't know how to cope with a shared tragedy. And Beaulah is just about to discover ... well, I don't want to give too much away.

I suspect I have another year's worth of work ahead before I can publish this one.

"Pink Skies"

Lush Landscapes at Mavi Contemporary

 

 

 "Hot Lilies" oil on canvas

"Blueberry Field" oil on canvas. 

The Weekly Volcano, June 30, 2011
The name of the show is Under Pink Skies, but the skies above the lush and colorful foliage in the Nina Weiss landscapes at Mavi Contemporary Art are orange and lavender and a steely blue-gray - not just pink.

The colors and the sure and deliberate brushstrokes in these landscapes are like rich confections, lakes and streams and bright skies made of sugar and whipped cream.

I easily tire of landscape art. It's generally very boring and predictable. After all, who ever does anything truly original with landscape art these days? Nobody, that's who. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I really liked these paintings.

The scenery is typical. There are bodies of water with marsh grasses and water lilies surrounded by trees with lots of sky. There's nothing unusual in any of that, of course. What makes these paintings stand out is the paint application.

Weiss, a nationally known artist from Chicago, applies her paint in very deliberate swirls and blobs of semi-translucent layers. It's almost as if every leaf and every wave is a separate dash or swirl of color with, in many cases, clumps of trees and grasses set off by dark contours. What these paintings are about is color, shape and paint application, not trees and sky and water. Paint takes precedence over subject matter, and I'm just enough of a stodgy old purist to think that's what painting should be all about - or it's not worth looking at.

"Ames Pond Diptych" is a long horizontal painting (80 inches wide) with a light blue sky that sits forward on the picture plane over a line of evergreen trees with vibrant dark edges - most notably with the lone tall tree on the right. The lily pads and grasses pop dramatically against the dark water.

"Hot Lilies" is one of my favorites. The sky is a milky orange and the trees and water are dark green with the same milky quality (if I keep repeating the word "milky" it's because it's one of the more unique aspects of Weiss's paintings). Clumps of leaves are layered light on dark as if squeezed out of a cake decorator‘s tube, and there's a little spot of red on the left that is so hot it looks like it's about to burst into flame.

Different from all the others is "Pearl Street," a picture of houses on a country road with leaf-bare trees in tones of orange, blue and yellow and, as in "Hot Lilies," an effective use of light over dark.

Not all of her colors are bright. Weiss uses dull colors very effectively and keeps most of her paintings within a narrow value key. An excellent example of the good use of dull colors can be seen in "Blueberry Field, Fenville," which is in tones of green and gray with dull accents of burnt orange and purple.

These are very enjoyable paintings worth careful contemplation. Also showing are abstract paintings by William Quinn, William Turner and Christopher Mathie, and in the vault landscapes by Michael Crowman - a carryover from a previous show but with some new additions.

Mathie's "Double Entendre" is a brilliant little gem of a painting. Be sure to visit the back gallery and take a look at this one.
Under Pink Skies

through July 17, 2–7 p.m., Wednesday–Sunday
Mavi Contemporary Art, 502 Sixth Ave., Tacoma
253.759.6233

Science and Industry

“Airplane”: Oil on canvas by Peter Sheesley

  

Peter Sheesley at Fulcrum

The Weekly Volcano, June 23, 2011
You may know Peter Sheesley from the painting demonstrations he did at Tacoma Art Museum in connection with the Norman Rockwell exhibition.

I have a confession to make: I was not impressed with what I read about Sheesley, nor with what I saw on his website. I thought of it as realism and nothing more than a show of painting virtuosity. But when I saw Sheesley's show, Science and Industry, at Fulcrum Gallery, I realized there was much more to him. I also realized that Sheesley's work - especially dark and moody pieces such as these - do not reproduce well, on paper or online. What you see in print here is a pale reproduction of what you can see in the gallery.

Sheesley's paintings in this show are taken from candid photographs snapped in Chicago's Museum of Science & Industry. The key word is "candid." None of the people seen interacting with each other and with the exhibits in the museum are aware that they are being photographed. For the most part they seem unaware of each other as well. There is a strange voyeuristic quality to these paintings and an equally strange disconnectedness among many of the people pictured.

The other unique qualities that set these paintings apart from the run-of-the-mill realist paintings are his depiction of light in darkness and the futuristic quality. These are not spaceships from the 24th century, they are airplanes, some quite old, on display in a museum, and yet they look futuristic - sleek, shiny and otherworldly.

Pictured here is one with the unassuming title "Airplane." It's a head-on view of the nose and cockpit of an airplane of nonspecific vintage. It is so sleek and smooth that it looks like a helmet worn by a spaceman. Behind it, hanging as airplanes do in museums, is an old crop duster. The angles of the wings combined with the sleek roundness of the newer airplane create an intriguing linear design and break up the space in interesting ways.

But it is the lightness within darkness that really sets these paintings apart. Everything is in almost a monotone with dark burnt sienna and ochre reminiscent of sepia-tone photographs and highlights of soft blues and yellows and violets where light reflects off shiny metal surfaces and the clothes and faces of people meandering through the museum.

In "Control Room," the television monitor screens appear a softly glowing sky blue when seen from across the room, but are seen to be very light pink and purple when seen up close. The workers at their consoles are barely visible in the darkness.

In "Crowd," random groups of people seen from a distance and above, as if viewed from a balcony, are spots of softly luminous light in tones of yellow and blue. There is a strong sense of slow movement as these people negotiate the open space in a kind of ballet.

There are six large oil-on-canvas paintings in the front room of the gallery. Each is a study of light within darkness. They draw you in through mood and mystery and then you gradually begin to discern the interesting details of barely visible people and machines.

In the back gallery there are five smaller paintings that are similar but with less darkness. One of these, which gallery owner Oliver Doriss said drew the most attention from the opening crowd, is a little painting of a woman in a blue dress sitting in an airplane seat. Sheesley says he was influenced by Lucian Freud, one of the great figure painters of the 20th century. That influence is clear in this painting.

This small show is quite mesmerizing. I definitely recommend it.
Peter Sheesley: Science and Industry

Through July 13, noon to 6 p.m. Thursday–Saturday and by appointment
Fulcrum Gallery, 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma
253.250.0520

Hot time, summer in the city

From left: Christian Doyle, Michael Lengel, 

Kate Dinsmore, Matt Posner, Alison Monda

Kate Dinsmore and Michael Lengel

Review "Sixties Kicks"

“Summer in the Sixties” is Harlequin Productions’ rocking tribute to the best music of the era that shall forever more be characterized by the phrase sex, drugs and rock and roll. What a selection of songs! What a cast! What a band!

Harlequin’s summer rock shows are legendary, from “Dancin’ in the Aisles,” where half the audience jumped to their feet and boogied in front of the stage; to “Sixties Chicks,” a tribute to girl singers the likes of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Diana Ross; to last year’s “Sixties Kicks,” a precursor to the current show highlighting songs by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and The Beach Boys - that was a knockout. Hell, they all were. And this summer’s offering may be the best of them all.

For starters, it hast an almost identical cast to last year’s “Sixties Kicks,” with the exception that instead of the great Antonia Darlene this show has Christian Doyle, who can’t be compared with Darlene because he’s a different type of singer, but who really rocks the house. The other cast members are Kate Dinsmore, Michael Lengel, Alison Monda and Matt Posner.

The band is also practically identical: Rick Jarvela lays down a throbbing bass line; Maria Joyner rocks an insistent drum beat; Brad Schrandt is on keyboard and horns; and musical director Bruce Whitney on keyboard plus a mean acoustical guitar and even a surprise vocal solo on The Grateful Dead’s “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been” – plus new addition Daven Tillinghast on guitar.

My one criticism of their previous sixties music revues was that some of the music was a little too polished, i.e., not raw enough, and that the costumes for “Sixties Chicks” looked more like musical theater costumes than authentic sixties garb.

Those problems have been overcome in spades with this show. The costumes by Kathleen Anderson are wilder and more authentic looking. (A note of explanation: some purists searching archives of hippie clothing might say these are not strictly authentic either, but they perfectly capture the feel and spirit of the wildest clothing of the era. One thing that is not authentic is that the men have short hair, but I think it was a wise decision not to have them wear long-hair wigs, which would have probably looked phony.)

And the music is loud and often guttural with raspy screaming voices that easily flow into more mellow tones highlighted by Tillinghast’s wailing guitar. This music has the raw edge that is usually missing when musical theater people try their hand at rock.

The song selection focuses mostly on the late sixties, with a heavy dose of psychedelic music. There is a wide-screen projection compiled by Jill Carter at the back of the stage with historical video clips and psychedelic light images that tell stories of the time – particularly the politics and the war in Vietnam, with a special homage to the Peace Corps, which was born in 1961 and celebrated its 50^th anniversary this year.

Posner sets the mood for the evening with hard-driving hits like The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” and Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” with a great guitar solo by Tillinghast.

Doyle lightens the mood with his lilting rendition of “In the Summertime” (see how well they milk the show’s title). Doyle’s comical gestures, facial expressions and dance moves throughout are a joy to watch – this is not a play, it’s a musical revue, but the cast members do assume characters and prove that they are experienced actors as well as singers.

Act 1 reaches a crescendo with Monda’s wild rendition of “I’ll Put a Spell on You.” In previous reviews I have written about Monda’s broad vocal range. We saw evidence of it again in her recent performance in “I’m Into Something Good” at Centerstage. But in this show, and especially on that song she does things I didn’t think were possible with the human voice. She screams and grunts and warbles melodically, and holds notes until you think she’s going to pass out; and she does it all with perfectly clear enunciation and grace. And it’s all kicked up to a higher level with great sax and guitar solos and highlighted by an animated projection of reluctant Army inductees getting their physicals and marching off to war, done in the style of Terry Gilliam’s “Monty Python” cartoons.

The mood shifts to breathtakingly lyrical when the five-person cast harmonizes beautifully on Crosby, Still, Nash and Young’s “Judy Blue Eyes” – a song almost everyone remembers, not by its title but by the repeated refrain “I am yours, you are mine, you are what you are. You make it ha-aard.”

Lengel shines brightly on the Doors’ “Break On Through to the Other Side” and later an Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’” and Dinsmore channels Janice Joplin on “Me and Bobby McGee.” She makes it her own and not an imitation of Joplin, but she does get a lot of Janice’s unique vocal inflection right down to hints of her East Texas twang.

After a huge standing ovation opening night the cast came back for multiple encores. The audience didn’t want to let them leave the stage and the cast and band didn’t want to stop the music. This is fabulous entertainment for a summer time out on the town.

WHEN: Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. through July17

WHERE: State Theater, 202 E. 4^th Ave., Olympia

TICKETS: $34 - $37

INFORMATION: 360-786-0151; http://www.harlequinproductions.org/

Tapestry time

"Warped, Beaten and Hung" at Brick House

The Weekly Volcano, June 16, 2011
Pictured: "Tori": Wool and cotton by Margo MacDonald Photo courtesy Brick House Gallery

The latest show at Brick House Gallery - Warped, Beaten and Hung - is a showcase of works by members of Tapestry Artists of Puget Sound. I think they could have called it Cecilia Blomberg and friends, because Blomberg's work dominates the exhibition.

The showstoppers are two large works by Blomberg: "Rising Tide" and "The Milkmaid." "Rising Tides" pictures rows of huge concrete block steps leading down into water, with the lowest row under water, creating an illusion of transparency through the use of subtle color changes, something that can't be easy to do with woven thread, which cannot be physically transparent. The viewpoint is as if one were standing on the top row of steps looking down, so that it becomes an almost totally abstract design of repetitive shapes with a very soft balance of contrasting and harmonious shapes and colors. In purely visual terms this is the strongest piece in the show.

"The Milkmaid" stands out due to its large size and the ghostly appearance of the central figure. I was told by gallery owner Peter MacDonald the image was taken from an old double-exposure photograph. It pictures a milkmaid walking forward from shaded woods with, below her, another picture of the same milkmaid and a cow. It is a successful piece because of Blomberg's smart color choices - predominantly soft grays with hints of yellow and brown - and due to the unique imagery. It's an old faded photo in thread.

There are also a couple of interesting little abstract and semi-abstract pieces by Blomberg that use threads that extend beyond the surface.

Another large tapestry that stands out with immediate impact is "Tori" by Margo Macdonald. This is an intensely colored picture of a Japanese gate standing in and reflected in water. The brilliant red of the gate is on fire against the deep blue of water.

Another work that is very intriguing is "Dearest" by Inge Norgaard. I was told this piece depicts a mythological tale. It certainly looks like a depiction of mythology, although I'm not familiar with the particular story. There is a strange naked woman squatting down in the woods talking to a deer, which is standing upright on its hind legs. The setting is idyllic. The unexplained hints of narrative are intriguing. The drawing looks primitive. The woman with her oddly flattened and squared-off breasts reminds me of line drawings by Matisse and Cézanne.

Also very interesting are two small pieces by Mary Lane. Both are of women's dresses presented as flat patterns on an equally flat and patterned background. They remind me of some of Jim Dine's many famous paintings of his bathrobe. One of Lane's tapestries is of a summer dress over a floral pattern and the other is of a dress printed with patchwork quilt patterns in various shades of brown over a black background with line drawings of dress patterns. The resonance between a traditional woman's media (tapestry) and a similarly typical woman's occupation (dressmaking) is obviously intentional yet visually subtle.

This is a very interesting show with a wide variety of styles and methods of art created from wool, cotton and other cloth materials. The show runs concurrently with a similar show at the Handforth Gallery at the Tacoma Main Library, Passages: Small Tapestry International 2, featuring small tapestries from all over the world. Works by at least three of the local artists featured in the Brick House show can also be seen in the show at the library. They are Lane, MacDonald and Blomberg.
Warped, Beaten and Hung

Third Thursdays 5–9 p.m. and by appointment, through July 15
The Brick House, 1123 S. Fawcett, Tacoma
253.627.0426, thebrickhousegallery.com