An Extraordinary Convergence

An Extraordinary Convergence

By Tom Wachunas

    EXHIBIT: 71^st ANNUAL MAY SHOW, THROUGH JUNE 2 at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton. gallery@northcantonlibrary.org

 

    “My selections are not meant to illustrate the breadth of the capabilities of Stark County artists but instead to create a conversation about what I saw to be the most interesting achievements to date.”   - painter Jack McWhorter, juror for the 71’st Annual May Show-

    First, here’s a thumbs-up to fellow artist/blogmeister Judi Krew for her critique of this juried show (link provided here - http://snarkyart.blogspot.com/2013/05/71st-annual-may-show-at-north-canton.html ). Therein she included a photo of her wildly ornate and tactile piece from her Hoard Couture series, which garnered First Place honors in the Three-Dimensional category, and also a photo she took of me sniffing the brilliant oil pastel bloom by Diane Belfiglio (Second Place winner in Drawing) at the opening reception.

    Krew’s review also reminded me about disclosure. So yes, her photo of that whimsical moment also shows my own work (Second Place in Mixed Media) on the wall next to Belfiglio’s. I’m elated, grateful and, frankly, humbled to be in the company of so many truly remarkable artists.

    Unexpected circumstances in the jurying of the show were such that a single individual – Jack McWhorter, Associate Professor of Painting at Kent State University at Stark - judged the entries. There were 124 submissions from 75 Stark County artists. McWhorter selected 50 works for the show. 

    The resultant ensemble is a striking mélange of styles and media, and unquestionably the most exhilarating May Show I’ve ever seen at this venue. Elizabeth Blakemore, Little Art Gallery curator, has once again proven her considerable skill at hanging diverse collections such as this. It’s an art in itself, to be sure, to present “traditional” imagery with works of relatively more contemporary content in a way that is sensually and intellectually engaging throughout the exhibit.

  

   Particularly alluring, for example, is the placement of Sherri Hornbrook’s  acrylic painting, Quest (First Place in the Oil and Acrylic category), next to Eleanor Kuder’s oil, Rose Hips (Second Place in the same category). Hornbrook’s is an electrifying and enigmatic abstract work. Its bold blue diagonal lines are vectors that seemingly invade clusters of red and orange organic (vaguely floral) shapes, all floating on a misted background. Kuder’s boldly contoured recumbent figure on opaque blue, surrounded by loosely rendered blossoms, evokes the raw, dreamlike imagery of Marc Chagall. Both pieces employ very bright palettes that effectively play off each other, and both exude a mystical sort of tension.

    First Place in Mixed Media went to Randall Slaughter for his elegant abstract collage, Long Way Home. It’s an impeccably balanced arrangement of shapes, spontaneous-looking marks, colors and surface textures that has a distinctly vintage feel about it – abstraction in the “classical” sense. Similar in sensibility, though I think more compelling and muscular, is Lynn Weinstein’s acrylic abstraction, More Organized Than Usual.

    If there could be such a thing as an “Endangered Species Award” in painting, Frank Dale would surely win it for his oil portrait, Girl In A Rosewood Chair. Dale is a master of the Renaissance Flemish Method, and his technique is utterly enthralling. The sophisticated woman in his painting is set against a background of purple so intoxicatingly deep that it feels like infinity. Have some fun and make up a story. Imagine the expression of self-possessed taunting on her illuminated face as if it were directed at the young man on the opposite wall of the gallery in Erin Wozniak’s portrait, Morning (Best In Show).

    This flawless and captivating portrait is a subtle blending of pastel, colored pencil and graphite that goes far beyond photorealism. With astonishing, meticulous naturalism - right down to the wispy (almost invisible) blue veins under pale flesh - Wozniak delivers a lyrical gem. Her image of a haggard man doesn’t appear to be drawn “on top of” the paper at all. Instead it seems to magically emerge from within the white ground, like waking up from a deep if not troubled sleep. 

    I wonder if some (maybe many?) viewers might be somewhat perplexed at the awarding of First Place in Watercolor to Daniel Chrzanowski for his Critic with Neolithic Skull. In these parts, watercolor painting is a tradition so longstanding and revered that it’s practically sacred. While the ten other watercolor entries here are all certainly noteworthy for various reasons, Chrzanowski’s is a jarring departure from the more conventional pleasantries we normally associate with the medium.

    Call it more of a study than a complete, resolved “picture.” Better yet, the monochromatic gestures of a painter rendering watery nuances of a face. Not a scene, but perhaps a paragraph. Comprised of related phrases. Each one a variation on the theme of making marks and shapes. A watercolor painting about watercolor painting. 

    In any event, the painting reminds me of what I find so exciting about this show. It’s a thoroughly egalitarian gathering of visions as stimulating to the mind as they are tantalizing to the eyes.

PHOTOS (from top): Rose Hips by Eleanor Kuder; Critic with Neolithic Skull by Daniel Chrzanowski; Morning by Erin Wozniak; Quest by Sherri Hornbrook

Connect the Dots, Fill in the Blanks

 Connect the Dots, Fill in the Blanks

By Tom Wachunas

    EXHIBITION: Blind Date at Translations Art Gallery, THROUGH JUNE 1, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Hours are Wednesdays Noon to 9 p.m., Thursdays through Saturdays Noon to 5 p.m.  www.translationsart.com

    “Even at their most artful and compelling, written words are essentially drawings which rely on remembered words to become meaningful. But the most compelling or meaningful images or pictures are those which require no such reliance.”

-June Godwit, from Adventures in Greymatter Doublespeak-

    It’s baaack. Blind Date, third edition, this time with 16 writers and 16 visual artists. For a review of the overarching concept at work here, I give you the following link to my commentary on the previous incarnation of this exhibit - http://artwach.blogspot.com/2011/05/striking-matches-writing-images-seeing.html  (which seems to be on its way to becoming a Translations tradition). Kindly read the first four paragraphs, as my “old” thoughts are, I hope, clear enough, and still largely applicable to the current show.

    On my first visit to the current show, I made a mind game of it by looking at the visual entries and formulating my own “narratives.” My second visit was devoted more exclusively to the written entries (some being considerably lengthy). The show seems to invite just that sort of vicarious participation on our part as viewers, and I was curious as to what extent I might be on the same page, as it were, with the artists’ interactions with each other.

     And as often as connecting the dots between image and words can be comfortably achieved, there are just as many “duets” here that are substantially more challenging, requiring some creativity on our part to fill in the blanks.

    For example, one of the most enigmatic entries is the pairing of “Georgiana,” written by Tyler Mowry, with an exquisite machine-stitched fabric work by Mary Ann Tipple called “Monday.” Mowry’s text is in one way a surreal parable. The life of a poor immigrant woman is placed side-by-side with a fictional document titled The Houghton Report, a government assessment of a 1962 Russian nuclear attack on American soil. While the two-part written presentation is something of a head-scratcher, it does include a fleeting image of laundry hanging on a line, which is central to Tipple’s intricately textured wall hanging.

    Another very fine Tipple work in the same medium, Mom G, is paired with a poem, To Have and to Hold, by Julie Winters. Here, the relationship between the poignant text and image is considerably more edifying.

    So too the joining of two particularly ambitious visions here: The Story of Gail and Garth, a short story by Moriah Ophardt, and Not Fade Away, a very large scale painting on simulated brick and louvered café doors by Jeff Pullen. Ophardt’s story is a breezy read about Gail, an 80 year-old woman. She moves into a neighborhood of townhouses and lives with her dog Garth, a rambunctious, profusely drooling Mastiff. Pullen’s sunny, expansive view of the townhouses is magnetic one, seeming to attract questions about what goes on in and outside these homes – questions delightfully entertained in the text.

    This same kind of elegance – an efficacious balance between literary and visual meaning – is present in several other engaging works. The emotionally potent writing about an absentee father in The Passing Whisper by Ingrid De Sanctis is accompanied by Waiting for William, a beautifully haunting photograph by Mandy Altimus Pond. Elsewhere, there’s nothing really extraordinary about Boathouse, John Radigan’s photograph of a boathouse and red-leafed trees, gently distorted and reflected in a lake. But the “reflection” becomes more weighted after reading M.J. Albacete’s eponymous contemplation of a lakeside encounter with nature. The liquid ripples of the photograph then take on a new significance when we read Albacete’s description of how rain falling on his eyeglasses blurs his vision and stirs a sense of angst.

    Especially dramatic in successfully embodying the concept behind this exhibit is the poem Hurricane Sandy by Cheryl Henderson, mated with Thinking About Hurricane Sandy, a vertical diptych painting by Dr. Fredlee Votaw. The rhythmic scheme of the poem has the feel of a strident march or dark singalong, childlike and chilling. Here’s the opening of the poem: “Closed eyes./ Paralyzed./ Worst fears realized./ Left alone to wonder why./ As wind and waves go rushing by.” The top half of Votaw’s painting is the ghostly image of a youthful face, eyes seeming to peer far beyond us, fixed in a state of eerie calm (or shock?). Below is the impressionistic suggestion of blue seas in an atmosphere seething with rhythms of tiny white dots - snow, or dust, or pulverized debris.  

    What is at work in this Henderson/Votaw meeting (as in others throughout this exhibit, some to lesser degrees of effectiveness) is a coactive chemistry. Image and text come together in equal measure, each being an agent in fully realizing the other. It’s a highly intriguing match-making enterprise. 

PHOTOS (from top): Not Fade Away by Jeff Pullen; Thinking About Hurricane Sandy by Dr. Fredlee Votaw; Monday by Mary Ann Tipple           

Verdant Visions

Verdant Visions

By Tom Wachunas

    “It is Spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

    -Rainer Maria Rilke

    EXHIBIT: Verdant Visions at Gallery 6000, on view THROUGH JUNE 21, located in the University Center Dining Room on the Kent State University at Stark campus, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton. ARTISTS RECEPTION is on MONDAY EVENING, MAY 13, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Please RSVP to Becky DeHart at (330) 244-3518 or rdehart@kent.edu

    Lately I’ve been reminded that it’s possible to over- think and/or over-teach a subject – in my case, the course I teach at Kent Stark called “Art as a World Phenomenon.” Ooooh, such a serious (and somewhat unmemorable) name for what was formerly called “Art Survey” - essentially art appreciation. What, really, was so wrong with the old name of the course? Who comes up with this stuff anyway? But I digress.

    In my passion for communicating what visual artists do and how they do it, perhaps I give too much undeserved glory to the philosophical pretensions and contradictions of Postmodernist art. Such heady attention to contemporary art issues can come at the cost of downplaying the sheer pleasure that can be had in embracing conventional Representation and Naturalism on its own terms. Mea culpa.

     Recently I read a considerable number of papers by my students who apparently thought that every painting of things seen in nature must necessarily be symbolic in order to be valid or relevant, as in having “meaning” or an underlying “message” beyond the visual evidence at hand. But it seems to me that really seeing a masterfully painted flower, for example, can (or should be) an ennobling, joyous experience in itself. Encountering “traditional” art need not be a challenge to solve some presumed mystery.

    So for those bent on finding a message in the current show at Gallery 6000, try this one on for size, with apologies to Gertrude Stein: sunlight is sunlight, shadow is shadow, a rock is a rock, a flower is a flower, a cloud a cloud. Get the picture(s)?

    The exhibit features 18 vibrant works by five highly accomplished artists: Diane Belfiglio, Jim Grand, Irene Tobias Rodriguez, Kris Wyler and Isabel Zaldivar. Their excellent images in watercolor, oil, acrylic and pastel explore the sumptuous textures, light, and brilliant colors of spring through floral and landscape themes.

  

    Stop and smell the roses? Come to think of it, there’s nary a rose to be found in this spectacular celebration of the season. Still, the show is resplendent with a sublime aroma, as it were, of poetry that only Nature can inspire and skilled hands make palpable.

    PHOTOS: (from top) Azaleas’ Song of Spring by Irene Tobias Rodriguez; Passion in Pink II by Diane Belfiglio; North Light – View from my Studio by Jim Grand

Poignant Parting Notes

Poignant Parting Notes from Canton Symphony Soloists

By Tom Wachunas

Mozart, Schubert, Reger: Lauren Roth (violin), Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong (viola), Hyunsoo Kim (piano), Cable Recital Hall, Canton Symphony Orchestra (chamber series), Canton, Ohio (USA), May 3, 2013

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major (1778)

Franz Schubert: Sonata for Arpeggione (Viola) and Piano (1824)

Max Reger: Trio for Violin, Viola and Piano in b minor (1891)

    When violinist Lauren Roth stunned a packed Umstattd Hall last October 7 with her breathtaking performance of Menotti’s Violin Concerto in a minor, it was abundantly clear that the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) had acquired a world-class Concertmaster. Since then, she regularly provided a thrilling dimensionality to programs throughout the CSO’s 2012-2013 concert season.

     The season concluded on May 3 at Cable Recital Hall with a chamber concert that featured Roth along with CSO principal violist Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong and guest pianist Hyunsoo Kim. This was an enchanting program delivered with impeccable technique and inspired readings of the works’ many emotional nuances. 

    Mozart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major (K.301) is a harmonically charming intertwining of the two instruments. The give-and-take exchanges between Roth and Kim during the lilting first movement were crisp and spirited, as were the dance-like syncopations of the second, with just a hint of somber nostalgia in the middle passages.

    There are similar emotional tinges in Schubert’s Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano. Schubert composed the work in 1824 specifically for the Arpeggione, a six-stringed instrument fretted and tuned like a guitar but bowed like a cello. The instrument never caught on. By the time Schubert finally published his work in 1871, he included his arrangement for cello or viola.

    In any event, here violist Wong captivated the audience from the start with the sheer depth of her sound. Her warm sonority is well suited to the plaintive, melancholic character of the work’s opening melody as well as the more sustained, contemplative inflections in the second movement.

    Wong’s tonal subtleties are remarkably evocative, and a fitting complement to Roth’s  soaring clarity and lyricism. It is indeed a charismatic chemistry which has produced numerous magical moments in past CSO performances as well as on this occasion.

    Max Reger’s Trio for Violin, Viola and Piano, somewhat reminiscent of Brahms, is a beautiful and riveting three-movement work, rich with textures, rhythms and color. At times it conjures images of a highly animated three-way conversation. It begins in a brooding spirit and from there hovers alternately between controlled tumult and sustained solemnity. There is a distinct aura of sadness in the music, as if hearing a lingering goodbye, performed here with passionate intensity. 

    This particular mood of the work took on an especially poignant relevance in knowing that it marked the final CSO appearance for both the violist and the violinist. Wong will be moving on to Philadelphia to pursue her graduate studies, and Roth has been recently named Concertmaster of the Tucson Symphony. I wish both of them continued success and my deepest gratitude for their superb artistry.

    That said, I prefer to think of their departure not so much as a CSO loss as it is an opportunity to remain the potent magnet that it is for drawing musicians of their caliber.

 Photos: Lauren Roth (top), Zsche Chuang Rimbo Wong