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Scene and Herd: Are We Having Fun Yet?

2012-02-12T11:56:00.001-08:00

Scene and Herd: Are We Having Fun Yet?
By Tom Wachunas

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” - Charles Dickens, from “A Tale of Two Cities” –

And now for something completely different: some thoughts on why I’ve chosen NOT to review a well-hyped local theatre production.

The cover of The Repository Ticket Section on Friday, February 10, was an eye-popping exercise in sanguine sensationalism. A photo of two actors, one holding a bloodied chain saw to the neck of the other, was accompanied by the boldface headline, juxtaposed with photo- shopped blood drips, “A Different Kind Of Musical Comedy” (referring to the upcoming production of “Evil Dead: The Musical” at Kent State University Stark).

I think it’s interesting that we often perceive a division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ when it comes to the time we spend in our diversionary activities, as in “arts and entertainment.” As if our entertainment needs to escape from what we might regard as the too-profound or lofty content of fine art, or that our art is somehow less legitimate if it’s seen as too merely entertaining.

But let’s not forget that ‘entertainment’ as a descriptor has a deeper meaning and application: that which we maintain and/or cherish in our minds, as in to entertain an idea. Of course some ideas are better than others. Come to think of it, some ideas are just plain bad, as is the case with the musical in question. Deliberately forgetting about whatever real performance or technical excellence the production might have to offer (guess I’ll never know, huh?), I decided that it was a bad idea for me to see this particular show that carries this caveat (prompting in turn a few more general considerations about the state of our contemporary entertainment offerings, artful or not): “Viewer discretion for this production is strongly advised due to gratuitous profanity, gore, and adult subject matter.”

It’s not that I think spoofing the horror genre is an inherently problematic idea, though in this case I suspect I’m being more than generous. And I wonder if the musical’s song titled “What The F____ Was That?” is an unintentionally self-inflicted skewering of its bawdy fecklessness (I admit to seeing a few You Tube-type short clips of the show).

But “gratuitous profanity, gore, and adult subject matter,” and similar warnings, have been increasingly visible red flags pitched on the entertainment landscape these days. That would include contemporary TV, film, music, theatre, and the ubiquitous internet. I’m talking about the kind of content that, with burgeoning frequency, unabashedly imitates and exploits the bizarre, violent, dark, kinkier and otherwise salacious aspects of life - so often praised as fun and funny, or real and “in the now” - rather than illuminating or expanding the truly inspiring, the sublime, and yes, the Divine.

I have often heard the argument, for example, that profanity and filthy street language are acceptable everyday indulgences that bring “authenticity” and “honesty” to our expression of who we are and what we think. But I think this is a jaded, insidiously complacent attitude that denies a deeper, more disturbing symptom of a cultural malaise when it comes to what we should be consistently supporting and seeking from ourselves and from our artists/entertainers. The language and subject matters of our entertainment are mirrors and barometers of the condition of our focus, the state of our minds and hearts. As it is, I sense that a growing societal tolerance of, and consent to, our baser instincts has been eating away at our ability to discern between depravity and dignity, between self-absorbed hedonism and nobility.

And underlying all these considerations is the pervasive climate of ideological pluralism and moral relativism that has defined our era. As I grapple with the fact that my aesthetic standards may not be yours, I choose to remember that as a Christian, I have in fact been graced with the wherewithal to focus, in all things, on the mind of Christ that dwells in me (my failures to always do so notwithstanding), including how I use my time and where I place my attentions.

So I’ll leave you for now, once again, with these Divinely inspired words from Paul to the Philippians (4:8-9): “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into practice. And the God of Peace will be with you.”

Photo: Detail – right panel from the triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch

Stark Realities

2012-02-08T09:42:00.001-08:00

Stark Realities
By Tom Wachunas

If a thematic link is to be found among the 12 works that comprise the current show called “Stark Realities” at Main Hall Gallery on the Kent Stark campus, it’s not in the show’s title. That might suggest, on the face of it, a compilation of works that commonly share something stiff, bleak, harsh or perhaps forbidding. This show is anything but.

The title of my latest curatorial project, then, is simply a reference to the 12 participants being local, Stark County artists. So there is no conceptual theme other than my intent to mount an exhibit that indicates, to a reasonably interesting degree, the substantial depth of creative activity in these parts. To that end, I certainly realized that this space could never contain an exhaustive presentation of media variety or roster of accomplished local artists. As it is, on view are individuals I greatly respect and have written about in the past, and their works in this show are of their own choosing. I’m thrilled to report that this group stepped up to the invitation with flying colors, as it were, making for a truly eclectic gathering of visions that alternately intrigue, entertain, and edify. A mixed bag of challenge, chutzpah, and charm.

Kevin Anderson’s mixed media wall piece, “Hold On,” is a stunningly crafted memento/fantasy of sorts – a child-like model rocket ship under construction with the promise of flying away to a dream destination.

Dream-like, too, is Nancy Stewart Matin’s shimmering watercolor collage, “Moonstruck,” a vibrantly hued night landscape emerging from a subtly tactile ground.

And speaking of vibrant color, Sherri Hornbrook’s acrylic abstract, “Warded,” reminds me of a 1970s Artforum magazine marketing promotion with the text, “I love it. What is it?” Warded, as in one amorphous figure guarding the other? Or warded as in the intricate construction of lock mechanisms? Fascinating.

Both Ted Lawson (with his watercolor café scene “Pranzo Incantevole”) and Diane Belfiglio (with her floral oil pastel “Sunlight on Scarlet II”) provide real gems of compositional prowess and mastery of bright sunlight and shadow.

Another master in the mix – this one in the Flemish technique tradition - is Frank Dale, whose oil portrait, “Study of a Young Girl,” is a sumptuous and beautiful exercise in startling naturalism.

There’s remarkable naturalism at work, too, in Patrick Buckohr’s large, free-standing sculpture, “Young Camel with Cradle,” and all the more surprising when considering that it’s made completely from countless pieces of reclaimed steel – an airy mass of metal executed with astonishing craft and a playful dignity. Similarly, Joseph Close’s very tall “Moses ‘Rabbit’ White” has a dignity all its own. This seriously whimsical construction is made from found materials (largely wood) into a friendly giant of a jazz musician.

You could reasonably call Rick Huggett’s style Pop Minimalism. His precise application of acrylic silk screen ink gives his pictures a slick, commercial feel that only adds to their glib sparseness. Yet for all of the nervous, “unsophisticated” quality of line evident in his “Spigot On!” (a lawn sprinkler spewing squiggles of water into empty white space), the image is delightfully disarming in its giddy simplicity.

In the realm of photography, Stephen McNulty’s black and white “Light Study #42, Badlands, SD” is both haunting and riveting in its capture of dramatic mountain textures, rhythms, and shadows. And Michael Weiss’s digital mixed media “Free Home” is a wondrously convincing, surreal dreamscape featuring a lone man clutching a bunch of old houses like so many balloons on strings.

Finally, there’s the enigmatic “Sibling Rivalry,” a tempera, acrylic, and white pencil painting by the always surprising Patricia Zinsmeister Parker. It’s a matte blue effluence inscribed with scribbled white ‘portraits’ of two ladies with hats. The large red dot between them seems at once invasive and necessary – a mechanism or lens that points up the subtler gestural markings and variations in color saturation of the ground. Attention to tensions and fragile equilibrium. Call it a surface with psyche.

Opening artist reception at the gallery is on Thursday, February 9, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. The exhibit runs through Feb. 29. Located in the lower level of Main Hall on the Kent Stark campus, gallery viewing hours are Monday – Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m. to 12:00 noon.

Photos: Top – “Sunlight On Scarlet II" by Diane Belfiglio; Middle – “Sibling Rivalry" by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker; Bottom – “Warded” by Sherri Hornbrook

Exposing the Naughty Grain of History

2012-02-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

Exposing the Naughty Grain of History
By Tom Wachunas

“History is our simmering, crusty cauldron of Hunters Stew, hung above the fire of hindsight. We spice it up to suit prevailing palates of the day. So even as the main ingredients remain constant, it never seems to taste the same way twice.” - June Godwit, from “Post-structuralism: Flacid, yet absurd?” –

“Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land…If he have nothing but his hands, he may…by industrie quickly grow rich.” - John Smith -

“…I incorporate these different modes of narrative to mimic the way history functions: as collected bodies of knowledge – some skewed, distorted or biased – false histories that behave in a manner similar to true history…” - Chad Hansen, from his statement for his exhibit, “Revisionist Histories: America Retold” at Translations Art Gallery

In many ways, the splendid exhibit of drawings by Chad Hansen at Translations Art Gallery (formerly Anderson Creative) in downtown Canton has all the feel of a 19th century one-room school house. The artist has uniformly faux-painted the walls to resemble knotty wood planks upon which are hung dozens of his images drawn in Walnut ink – highly suggestive of illustrations from period American history books, and at times reminiscent of Harper’s Weekly political cartoons.

This is a compressed allegorical narrative of American history that begins with the arrival of English explorer John Smith (who established the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607), ensuing westward expansion, and climaxing with America’s deification of power mongers in their relentless march to corporate entity-hood. The unframed images are arranged in thematic “suites” comprised of one large drawing and several adjacent smaller drawings.

Be sure to pick up the accompanying hand-out, printed on imitation parchment, that identifies the 17 characters that populate the scenes in this fascinating re-telling of how America came to be what it is. Can’t see the show without a program, as it were. And be prepared to see this melting pot of personalities – drawn from ‘real’ history and conjoined with others from folkloric myth - in a new if not somewhat jarring light. Included among them: Ceasar, a “proponent of hostile take overs”; “real estate developers” James K. Polk, King George of England, and Thomas Jefferson; “Star Warrior” Ronald Reagan; and business man Carlo Ponzi (yes, THAT Ponzi). This is surely not a conventional history lesson.

“The Calling Suite” sets the tone, wherein we see a dragon-like creature called Money Monster placing Ceasar’s crown on the head of John Smith. From there, Hansen’s scenarios are an unfolding of unchecked imperialism, political and moral turpitude, and the apotheosis of greed. Speaking of which, Money Monster makes frequent appearances, usually rendered in green and with remarkably lavish linear detail that brings to mind the heraldic look of our meticulously engraved paper money.

Indeed, Hansen’s pictorial style in all of his drawings is saturated with remarkable embellishments of pattern and detail that suggests a kinship with lovingly embroidered antique story quilts. Yet for all of what might initially appear to be their charming “primitivism,” they collectively present an eminently modern and sobering vision. Forward, into the past.

Photos: Top – “Arriving in America Suite": Middle – “The Calling Suite" (detail): Bottom: “Industry Suite” by Chad Hansen. On view THROUGH FEBRUARY 25 at Translations Art Gallery, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Wednesdays through Saturdays, Noon to 5 p.m. www.translationsart.com

A Midwinter Night's Dream from Canton Symphony Orchestra

2012-01-30T17:33:00.000-08:00

A Midwinter Night’s Dream from the Canton Symphony Orchestra
By Tom Wachunas

The history of Western orchestral music is replete with works that have reverberated far beyond the concert hall to become practically ubiquitous cultural fixtures. Among those, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons ranks high on the list, particularly with the fourth in that set of violin concertos, "Winter," which opened the January 28 concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) at Umstattd Hall. For many, the work is so familiar, and heard in so many contexts (from elevators and malls to television commercials and doctors’ waiting rooms), that it has become something of a musical banality. But the CSO reading of the work was a delightful reminder of just how deeply engaging the piece really is.

CSO violinist Emily Cornelius’ performance intensity and technical bravura were riveting, and invested the work with a truly invigorating lyricism. Her tonal range was a seamless blend of silken delicacy and velvety muscularity, and always in fine balance with the orchestra (pared down to 15 pieces here). Together, orchestra and soloist brought palpable life to Vivaldi’s poetic/pictorial notations for the work, particularly in moments such as pizzicato strings suggesting mincing steps on brittle ice, or trudging through shivery cold winds.

Second on the program was Prokofiev’s "Lieutenant Kije Suite," a five-movement work that the composer developed from his score for the 1933 film released in the U.S. under the title The Czar Wants Sleep. The film was a skewering of Czarist bluster and a biting satire on inept military bureaucracy. Befitting the story line of Czarist commanders inventing the exploits of a non-existent lieutenant (only to kill him off in the end), the music is largely a charming foray into both insouciant joviality and mock-gravitas, and all robustly Russian in flavor.

The featured guest artist for this work was Daniel Boye, whose crisp, sonorous baritone brought just the right melding of soaring bravado and ponderous, ironic melancholy to the proceedings – an operatic panache that was spicy, but not overly aggressive. Similarly, the orchestra put forth a fully unified understanding of the work’s loopy drama and plucky mischief, from the mournful failed romance played out in the second movement, the comedic majesty of newfound love in the third (Kije’s Wedding), through the familiar, frolicking music of the brisk sleigh ride (Troika) in the fourth, and bittersweet funereal mood of the finale. The work ended as it began, with a somber, haunting off-stage solo trumpet fanfare that, again ironically, flavored the work with a sense of ethereal pomp.

What would a CSO concert be without Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann positing a humorous observation or two with the audience? True to form, before the final work on the program – Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 in G minor (“Winter Dreams”) – Zimmermann held up the hefty score and proposed that composer must have at one time visited Northeast Ohio. Tchaikovsky’s programmatic notes for the second movement characterize it as “gloomy land, misty land.” This elicited hearty laughs from the audience all too acquainted with the miserable vagaries of Ohio winters.

What followed, not surprisingly, was a full-blown marvel of orchestral precision under Zimmermann’s fluid baton, drawing out all the mesmerizing textures, moods, and and explosive passion that makes Tchaikovsky so…Tchaikovsky. That would include the particularly authoritative resonance of the brass section and its dynamic interplay with the sweetly piercing warmth of the wind instruments. That warmth would in turn blossom into relentlessly increasing heat during the final movement. To call the finale “a lengthy coda” (as did Kenneth C. Viant in his very thorough program notes) is something of an understatement. This fourth movement is a phenomenon in itself, wherein cumulative orchestral crescendos are paraded like so many repeated aural exclamation points. Here, the orchestra rose to the occasion with unflagging energy throughout.

Considering how Tchaikovsky’s nerve-shattering struggle to complete his first symphony nearly drove him to clinical insanity, it’s not unreasonable to imagine how he might have wanted this triumphal climax to last something close to forever, propelling him into Allegro vivo Nirvana, so to speak. In any event, judging from the thunderous applause, this masterful and exuberant performance sufficiently warmed the hearts of the audience as they trudged into the cold Canton night.

www.cantonsymphony.org

On the Artist's Life and Finding a Voice

2012-01-25T12:59:00.000-08:00

On the Artist’s Life and Finding a Voice
By Tom Wachunas

“Originality is a relative destination, and never only about a one-time arrival at utter newness. You get there by intention, through whatever means you choose to borrow, steal, or were imparted to you by someone else, and hard work. Always, hard work. Once there, you discover that it is a transient place, and not all that different from those you passed through along the way.” - June Godwit –

You can file this one as ‘inspired-by-but-having-nothing-necessarily-to-do-with-specific-works-at-hand.’ The works in question are those by middle and high school students from six Northeast Ohio counties, currently on view in the 58th Annual Northeast Central Ohio Scholastic Art Awards and Exhibit, hosted by Kent State University Stark.

As a rule I have very rarely “reviewed” art by students this young. It’s not because their work doesn’t warrant comment, or that they haven’t “arrived” yet, but simply because I prefer delving into the work of artists who have committed to the ‘artist’s life’ (not to be confused with livelihood), and are seriously developing a post-collegiate, maturing body of work.

This year’s Scholastic Art Exhibit comes at a time when I find myself at a daunting crossroads in my own work as a visual artist, grappling with the unsettling realization that, with just a few exceptions, I’ve been remaking the same piece for too many years. Call it taking an inventory of ideas, tools, techniques, and materials. As I seem to have outgrown my methodology, my message will hopefully remain vibrant and relevant, and continue to beckon and beguile, while I choose a different path in ‘voicing’ it. The artist’s life is indeed one of great constancy, ever attentive to creative possibilities and evolving perceptions, and acquiring the wherewithal to best articulate them. In that sense I’ll always be a ‘student’ and feel a sense of solidarity with all practicing students, no matter their age.

And so it is that as I encountered this particular exhibit, I was caught up in considerations of a more ephemeral nature beyond just formal analysis, apprehension of beauty, or comparing the efficacy of one technique or content with another. I was in fact aware of many influences and methods present in the works of these students, and thrilled – even inspired - to be in the presence of such youthful creative giftedness and skill, much of it astonishing. To witness the appearance of hearty seedlings and the stretching of wings, as it were. To savor the evidence of visual languages in the early stages of forming unique voices.

As in past installments of this annual event, there are more than a few examples of figurative paintings and drawings that appear to be made with the aid of digital photo projections or related tracing methods. I could be wrong, but in those works, the anatomical features, including challenging perspectives and foreshortening, are too startlingly precise and accurate to make me think they were executed free-hand. Often, such pieces exude more theatricality than real drama, eschewing true emotional affect in favor of spiffy special effect. I admit to favoring looser, more visceral approaches, still notably personal and inventive in their own right, and there are plenty of those here.

And in the end, for those students who will choose to continue their artistic pursuits (and many will not), it will always come down to wrestling with personal decisions, through a lifetime of crossroads, as to the best methods for letting their voices consistently soar. It’s a life lived somewhere between crazy and courageous, but always sublime.

Photos: Top – “Stretched” by Olivia Cody, Aurora High School. Bottom – “Ebony and Ellie” by Sabrina McLaughlin, Jackson High School. On view through February 2 in the 58th Annual Scholastic Art Exhibit at Kent State University Stark in the Fine Arts Building and also in the Campus Center. Viewing hours in both buildings are Mon. – Thurs. 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday 8 a.m to 5 p.m.

Pencil Precious

2012-01-19T11:25:00.001-08:00

Pencil Precious
By Tom Wachunas

I can’t tell you how many times over the past 20 years of looking at art from this region that I’ve been numbed silly by traditional still life renderings. ‘Still’ indeed - safe, quiet, ordinary, uninspired. But I was reminded recently that there are notable exceptions and that, in the right hands, the genre can still entertain and tantalize.

The majority of the 28 colored pencil works by Sharon Frank Mazgaj currently on view (THROUGH JANUARY 31) at Malone University’s McFadden Gallery are of the still life variety. Compared to those, the five portraits included in the show, while sumptuous in their manipulation of light, perhaps betray too much dependence on photography, particularly in the specificity of the faces. The expressive smiles seem almost too frozen and perfect, too filtered through a mechanical lens.

This is not to say that Mazgaj doesn’t work from photographs to execute her still life subjects (or that there’s anything intrinsically wrong about working from photographs). But it would be inaccurate to label her simply a photorealist, or that her still life drawings look exactly like photos.

Even if she does use a camera, she’s managed to make her imagery both personal and often even transcendent. More than just ‘photographic’ likenesses, these pictures are alive with wondrously enhanced light while achieving a softly subtle but engaging surface interest, generated via meticulous layering and blending of hues in a wide variety of saturations. Not only a superbly generous colorist, Mazgaj is also a thoughtful composer of pictorial structure, often employing strong, contrasting diagonal configurations amid refreshing perspectives. Additionally, she’s a master at rendering diverse textures and surfaces, particularly with reflective glass and metal forms. “Vintage Ornaments” is a veritable symphony of sparkling orbs that takes you deep into an intricate microcosm of amorphous reflected shapes and detail. Call it a sort of performance art with pencil as the central character.

And speaking of characters, several of her pieces make a big point of including vintage dolls. While sometimes their appearances are elegantly integrated with surrounding objects, as in the stunning “Amberg & Sons Composition Doll, circa 1915,” and “Tea With Strawberry Jam Toast,” there are others where the figurines seem a little out of place and over-animated, as in “There’s Something Going On Here.” The three naked, eerily glowing baby dolls have an oddly conspiratorial look about them. Then again, who says that the time-honored practice of the still life HAS to be all solemnly familiar and silent? Sometimes it’s simply pleasurable to see gleeful visual mischief-making, where whimsy trumps gravitas.

Beyond the artist’s remarkable technical bravura, what resonates most here is a sense of bright intimacy and a memento sensibility that thrills the eye while warming the heart.

Photos: Top – “Lion; Florence, Italy” / Bottom – “Tammy’s Tea Time” by Sharon Frank Mazgaj, colored pencil, on view THROUGH JANUARY 31, at Malone University’s McFadden Gallery, located in the lower level of the Johnson Center, 2600 Cleveland Avenue NW, Canton

Dynamic Duo Delivers

2012-01-16T06:53:00.001-08:00

Dynamic Duo Delivers
By Tom Wachunas

In many ways, the first performance (January 13) of the 2012 Chesapeake Energy Casual Series of chamber music concerts by members of the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) was an unfolded love story. CSO principal cellist Michael DeBruyn joined with pianist Francesca Tortorello to deliver a program that began with staid tenderness and steadily progressed into an unfettered outpouring of passion.

From the opening strains of Ralph Vaughn William’s lovely Six Studies in English Folksong, the duo articulated a warm, balanced aural blend that effectively imbued the entire work with a sense of lilting affection. They certainly took to heart the composer’s stated desire that these very brief, sweetly melodic songs be “…treated with love.”

The second work on the program was Cesar Franck’s iconic and challenging Sonata in A Major. In contrast to the gentle simplicity of the evening’s first selection, this work, composed in 1886 as a wedding gift to violinist Eugene Ysaye, is a gripping “story” of amorous beguilement and sensuality. Fittingly, the duo rose to the occasion with impressive sonority and rapturous grace.

This performance was a genuine partnership in crisp virtuosity, and both DeBruyn and Tortorello played with a consistent ardor that was downright infectious. A seamless flow of give-and-take energy between them was particularly intense during the fiery second movement as they negotiated the intricate, cyclic thematic embellishments. Their skillful intertwining of whimsy and drama that characterizes the third movement took on an increasingly fluid and improvisatory feel. By the time they had completed the thunderous coda in the fourth movement – a powerfully ecstatic and triumphant ending – the clearly appreciative audience responded with mirthful applause.

Such emotional momentum was brought to even more soaring heights with the evening’s final work, Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grande Tango. Before taking his seat, DeBruyn made a point of removing his tie and placing it on the piano as Tortorello looked on approvingly. Or should I say…seductively? For this performance was quite simply among the most authoritative demonstrations of lusty technique melded with unleashed musical libido I’ve ever witnessed. Enthralling, syncopated sizzle. The duo became the dance.

The sheer intensity and unity of purpose so eloquently presented in this work (and for that matter the entire program) could easily make one think that these gifted artists were literally married to the material. It is a sense made all the more reasonable when considering that DeBruyn and Tortorello are husband and wife in real life. Call it a marriage made in music.
Information and Tickets for upcoming CSO concerts available at www.cantonsymphony.org or by calling (330) 452 - 2094

(Re)Covering the Classics?

2012-01-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

(Re)Covering the Classics?
By Tom Wachunas

What was once not so old is new again. Anderson Creative Gallery, first established just a few years ago in the downtown Canton arts district, has acquired a new name in this, a new year: Translations Art Gallery. The new LLC, owned and operated by Craig Joseph (curator of the former Anderson Creative Gallery), is currently showing “Required Reading,” an exhibition of works by 20 artists, 11 of them new to the space.

For those viewers who may have been reluctant to fully embrace past exhibits here that called for the careful, sometimes extensive reading of literary materials (and there have been several – all nonetheless excellent), don’t be too put off by this one. The “required” reading is on one level more about the show’s premise than its overt visual content. The artists were asked to choose a title from a list of required high school or college reading, and create a book cover/jacket for a new release of the classic. The results constitute a mixed bag ranging from the predictable (though not uninteresting) to the surprising.

Simplicity rules in Matthew Doubek’s mixed media collage “Moby Dick” – a compact, energetic rendering of this whale tale’s tail in splashy dive mode. Holly Atkinson’s collage called “Sorrow and Strawberries” (for Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”) is a digital collage portrait in a somewhat overbearing gold frame that nonetheless exudes an antique, fecund charm. Both Margy Vogt and Cheryl Henderson employ digital printing technology to great effect, respectively providing crisp, handsome packaging for “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Frankenstein.”

Not so handsome, but appropriately jarring, is “Literary Outlaw” by Dylan Atkinson. This wax and oil portrait of William S. Burroughs, author of “Naked Lunch” (1959), is rendered in muddy, jaundiced hues, and is at once repulsive and compelling. Like a ghostly mask, it seems to both rise from and sink into a gray void. Urgent, like death.

More quietly compelling, and ambitious in scale, is William M. Bogdan’s black and white (with a passage of green markings along the bottom) woodcut portrait of Walt Whitman – an homage to the poet’s “Leaves of Grass” collection. For all of Whitman’s heroic exaltation of human physicality, Bogdan’s meticulously-cut image presents the poet as fading in and out of sharp view. The blacks are inconsistently saturated (intentionally?), giving the image a ghostly incompleteness which, interestingly enough, imbues it with a gentle lyricism.

And lyricism (if not mystery) is very much at work in Ashley Barlow’s mixed media collage, “The Giver.” I’m not familiar with the Lois Lowry children’s novel of the same name. But it might involve misadventure in a monochromatic world, as indicated by Barlow’s wintery palette interrupted by a bright red sled tipped over at the bottom of a snow covered hill.

Maybe the idea behind Kevin Anderson’s arresting “The Tell-Tale Heart” is for his wall sculpture to be photographed for a book jacket. But then we’d miss his ingeniously incorporated mechanical effect of the changing photo images that flash by to suggest body parts seen between floor boards. It’s an eerie and elegant work that looks like it came from a 19th century parlor, and thus in keeping with the Gothic spirit of Edgar Allan Poe’s story.

Similarly, Tim Belden’s photo-assemblage light box - “One Hundred Years of Solitude” - is more about concept than actual, marketable book jacket. Still, as a purely visual object - and like Kevin Anderson’s piece, very thoughtful in its construction - it is particularly alluring in its cryptic combination of images and even inspiring, as in invitation to investigate its source.

I’m not at all familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the novel regarded as his masterpiece, a non-linear, “magical realist style” metaphorical narrative about Colombian history, originally published in Spanish in 1967. Even that bit of information comes only from Googling the title. And so it is that Belden’s piece represents an important aspect of this exhibit: illuminating art’s power to pique our curiosity and prompt expanded cognitive links between differing forms of expression.

Consequently I feel sufficiently tempted to find and read the novel (as is the case, for that matter, with “The Giver”). To better “judge” the efficacy of the cover by its book.

Photo, courtesy Translations Art Gallery: “Literary Outlaw” wax and oil, by Dylan Atkinson. On View through January 28 at Translations Art Gallery, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Hours 12 noon to 5 pm Wed. – Sat. www.translationsart.com

The Body Eclectic

2012-01-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Body Eclectic
By Tom Wachunas

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred, no matter who it is, it is sacred –
- Walt Whitman, from “I Sing the Body Electric” –

“The body is a big sagacity, a polarity with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.”
- Friedric Nietzsche –

“Your body is a flower that life let bloom.” - Ilchi Lee –

Though some artists of the Abstract Expressionist ilk may howl their disagreement, I think one could make a very strong argument that there is no more potent and accessible vehicle for communicating the essence of humanity than the human form itself. The body - whether clothed or unclothed, idealized, symbolized, distorted, or otherwise rendered warts-n-all – appears in the art of all cultures and throughout time since (roughly) 25,000 BCE.

With the current exhibit called “Body Language,” the Canton Museum of Art is once again proving the impressive and surprising depth of its permanent collection. Featured here are works by 47 artists in a wild array of media and aesthetic styles – from the classically sublime to the thoroughly modern (including the downright funky). It’s a veritable sea of human forms, churning with all manner of gestures, postures, physical activities, and physiognomies. The show is every bit as purely “entertaining” as it is conceptually and emotionally gripping.

Speaking of gripping, Red Grooms’ silkscreen, “Mango, Mango” (rhymes with Tango, Tango), is a stunning, Pop-ish gem of composition and electrifying pattern design. The dancers look as if ready to step (or fall) right out of the picture plane. Meanwhile, in “Steppin Out,” a life-size porcelain sculpture by Verne Funk, the two slender Deco dancers in black, white, and gray are ingeniously fused together into a tight embrace.

Among many other personal favorites, here are just a few more: Thomas Hart Benton’s lithograph, “Island Hay,” a haunting and dramatic depiction of rural field workers; Kathe Kollwitz’s equally dramatic etching, “March of the Weavers” – the angry poor seemingly about to rise up into a blank yet oddly crushing sky; the quiet dignity and melancholy conveyed in Rockwell Kent’s lithographs; an eerily beautiful ceramic wall piece called “Lithe Diver” by Beverly Mayeri – a floating male swimmer, stretched out and evenly sliced into many pieces (as in filleting a fish?); the surreal hilarity and intricate workmanship in both Janis Mars Wunderlich’s earthenware sculpture “Puppy Queen,” and Mark Soppeland’s mixed media sculpture, “Concerned With Many Issues”; and the controlled, yet fluid, muscular brushwork in Jerome Witkin’s huge (66”x96”) oil painting, “Lockhart” – a portrait set in a marvelously complex interior space.

On your way into the upper gallery to see this show, be sure to notice the four important works on paper that were recently added to the Museum’s Permanent Collection (now numbering more than 1,600 works). These latest pieces are currently on view in the Museum lobby, but will likely not be up for the duration of “Body Language,” which closes March 4. WHAT FOLLOWS HERE IS REPRINTED FROM THE MUSEUM”S PRESS RELEASE REGARDING THE NEW ACQUISITIONS.

William Sommer, “U.S. Mail” (diptych), 1938, watercolor on paper, 35 7/8” x 20 7/8”, purchased in memory of John Hemming Fry. American Modernist painter, William Sommer (1867-1949), was a leader of The Cleveland School – a group of Cleveland-based artists active through the 1940’s. Sommer was unemployed and near destitute, until his situation improved in the mid 1930’s with commissions from the Works Progress Administration. Sommer began using his modernist style to depict the simple country life he enjoyed in Brandywine, Ohio; a rural community midway between Cleveland and Akron. U.S. Mail is a large composition combining transparent and opaque watercolor techniques -- a masterpiece of the medium, also demonstrating Sommer’s skill at adapting the aesthetic of WPA mural painting to the watercolor medium.

Lowell Tolstedt, “Blue Table with Plate of Cherries”, 2011, colored pencil on paper, 29” x 39”, purchased in memory of Edward A. and Rosa J. Langenbach. What Lowell Tolstedt achieves with colored pencil defies belief. Tolstedt (1939- ), a retired Columbus College of Art & Design professor, is known for his exquisite photo-realistic drawings of everyday objects. Given the association of realistic still life with old masters of the 17th or even mid 19th century, the very characteristics that make a work of art realistic in style and still life in genre are often the same characteristics that keep a work entrenched in tradition. But Tolstedt’s work is thoroughly modern – with the simple subject of placing fruit on a plate, he generates a playful tension with his realistic exploration of shape and texture.

Jim Dine – “Untitled (Hearts)”, 1976, watercolor, 16” x 20”, purchased in memory of the Luntz family. American Pop Artist, Jim Dine, grew up in Cincinnati, attended Ohio University then moved to New York in 1959. Dine’s roots as a painter lie in Abstract Expressionism, reflected in his brushy and gestural finish. Working with Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, Dine’s work moved from Abstract Expressionist towards Pop Art. In this genre he is an American icon and a great addition to the collection of the Canton Museum of Art.

Hughie Lee-Smith – “Industrial Scene”, 1953, watercolor, 15 ½” x 22 ¼”, purchased in memory of Austin Lynch and Mary K. Lynch. Hughie Lee-Smith is one of the most highly acclaimed African American artists to have begun his career in Cleveland. He painted the crumbling inner cities of Detroit and Cleveland. Lee-Smith struggled against the tide of Abstract Expressionism while adhering to his distinctive style, hauntingly enigmatic and sometimes described as Romantic Realism.

Photos courtesy Canton Museum of Art: Top – “Mango, Mango,” by Red Grooms. Bottom – “Island Hay” by Thomas Hart Benton. On view in “Body Language” THROUGH MARCH 4 at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N. in Canton. www.cantonart.org (330) 453 - 7666

The Tales We Weave (part 2 of 2): "Focus: Fiber 2011" in Canton

2011-12-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Tales We Weave (Part 2of 2): “Focus: Fiber 2011” in Canton
By Tom Wachunas

Another smaller, but vibrant work that requires a shift in viewing posture is Bonnie Patterson’s “Bitter Root.” The ‘ground’ for this piece seems at first to be an abstract field, and on one level it is. The multiple fabric swatches are heat transfer images of Montana topographical and geological images – a mapped landscape interspersed with a few larger images of Washington, D.C. When visiting this not- so- plain(s)- state(ment), tilt your head about 45 degrees clockwise to read the embroidered longhand text along the bottom half. Politics and poetry meet in a kind of folk-art embrace of social and environmental concerns. A story being told.

And it is indeed a narrative, often autobiographical sensibility that informs many other works here. In that sense, such works, for all their clearly modern look, speak nonetheless to early textile art traditions of storytelling as well as a passion for pure, decorative pattern.

June Lee’s “Who We Are” is a deceivingly simple presentation of five black, hand-sewn shirts with white collars, made from translucent Korean cloth. These are school uniforms, hovering in midair above five sets of disembodied, brightly colored fabric hands on the floor. Each set of hands is poised in a specific gesture. These would be signals, Lee tells us in her statement, passed (unseen by the teacher) between students. The piece is a stark, quietly provocative ‘story’ of declared individuality in the context of strictly imposed conformity - a new twist, perhaps, to ‘kid gloves.’

“Amazing Grace” by Cynthia Lockhart is an intensely explosive pastiche of hand-dyed and painted fabrics, lace, collage, and applique. Its spectacular opulence of color, shapes, and textures is a fittingly exuberant homage to divine presence along life’s meandering pathways. Another homage is “Gothic Vessel (after Duccio)” by Jennifer A. Reis. This one, spectacular in its own right, is to Duccio di Buoninsegna, a 13th century Italian painter of religious subjects. The intricate, swirling beadwork in this Madonna icon is wondrously evocative of shimmering golden mosaics. And speaking of beadwork, the three works by Simone Schiffmacher transform a burger, fries, and taco (each presented on a gold leafed cafeteria tray) into dazzling, jeweled trophies of a sort - an impressive, labor-intense apotheosis of junk food.

Among the more abstract, patterned works, Rumana Hawa’s “Unison Vault” is another fascinating example of Jacquard weaving, and utterly enchanting in its interlocked shapes. They’re every bit as complex and maze-like as the artist’s accompanying statement. Something maybe about metaphysics, metaphor, and/or the spirituality of math. Arcane language aside, the delightful proof here is in the looking. So be hypnotized, be very hypnotized.

Without having relevant statistics to back up or dispute any assumption that the fiber arts are still primarily ‘womens’ work’ (aside, possibly, from the context of international high-fashion clothing design), it is interesting to note that the work in this show is in fact predominantly by women. Having said that, Adam Kessler’s pieces, “Solar System Fan” and “Human Fan,” are remarkably unique entries. And it’s not so much because they’re by a male, but because of their appealing intimacy and facile embroidery of figures sewn through elegantly shaped wooden blades. At once hard, soft, and airy.

The conceptual play between hard and soft is very much at work in M.E. Ware’s “Power Suit for Modern Mothers.” Hard, as in a critical look at cultural stereotypes and assumptions about gender roles and appearances. Soft, as associated with delicate or feminine, and the raw material of the work – felted laundry lint! This freestanding work, humorous and severe, is made entirely from grayish lint that’s been sculpted into a clothing store mannequin wearing a woman’s business suit – a cautionary stepping out, perhaps, from dingy domesticity into tainted corporate power-grabbing.

Like so much of this exhibit, it’s a potent, inventive melding of intellectual and visual muscle…and grace.

Photos courtesy Canton Museum of Art: “Amazing Grace” by Cynthia Lockhart (top), and “Gothic Vessel (after Duccio)” by Jennifer A. Reis. On view through March 4, 2012, at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N. in Canton, Ohio. (330) 453 – 7666 www.cantonart.org

The Tales We Weave (part 1)

2011-12-28T06:08:00.000-08:00

The Tales We Weave (Part 1)
By Tom Wachunas

Over the past several decades, the “feminine needle arts” have convincingly outgrown their historical niche as decorative, functional craft. Quilts and embroidery samplers, for example, were once perceived in the West as the purview of women who were not otherwise encouraged to participate in a man’s world of ‘serious’ art making, and seen as relatively milquetoast mediums when compared to such ‘high art’ pursuits as painting and sculpture. But the creative and certainly ingenious manipulation of textiles (including weaving, quilting, embroidery, knotting, beadwork, and applique, among other methods) now occupies a significant and vital place in the world of contemporary fine art. Abundant and compelling evidence is currently on view in the spectacular exhibit called “Focus: Fiber 2011” at the Canton Museum of Art.

Coordinated with the Textile Art Alliance of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the show is a stunning cross section of fiber works by 39 artists from across eight states. The exhibit was juried by internationally prominent fiber artist Dorothy Caldwell, who selected 50 pieces from 278 submissions. In her statement for the show, she tells us, “I was struck by the audacious use of eccentric fabrics and casual construction – the unpredictable carrier of a message.”

Audacious…unpredictable…message. Yes indeed to all three. The range of scale, methods of construction, and visual/conceptual content here are remarkably deep, often surprising, and consistently intriguing.

In the hard-to-miss large scale department, there’s the razzle-dazzle “Resurrection” by Heather Ujiie. It’s a joyously electrifying union of digital ink jet images and embroidery, with beadwork and other intricate embellishments. This preternatural panorama – a psychedelic Garden of Eden tapestry, really – is made on six hanging cotton panels, each measuring 10’ in height and collectively spanning 19’ across. Absolutely mesmerizing.

Large (10’x4 ½’) and mesmerizing too, but in a much more understated way, is “Cell Tower Stretch” by Catherine Theodore. Her hand-dyed rayon and cotton threads are ‘Jacquard woven’ (a computerized loom mechanism/process that produces a tight, smooth, gently raised texture) into a lush, bluish-gray field beautifully interwoven with other colors that quietly offset the black silhouette of a cell phone tower, thus imbuing a thoroughly modern industrial structure with a classical elegance.

“In a Different Light” by Xia Gao is, again, very large (approx. 15’x7’) and even more subtle. This impressive expanse of buckram (a stiffened cotton/linen) is screen printed with an abstract, all- blue “pattern” that suggests an aerial view of earthbound organic detritus. The configuration looks as if literally lifted from the ground, like an elaborate collograph or stencil. The entire work hangs about three feet away from the wall, suspended from brackets, and is perforated all over with tiny burn holes. It begins to make more sense after reading Gao’s accompanying statement (something I highly recommend for all the works in this show).

Therein we learn that the work addresses Gao’s personal connection to the state of Nebraska and that the tiny holes were produced by burning incense sticks through the fabric. The randomness of the organic plain becomes a kind of organized spiritual plane that passes light through the holes, making for the delightful surprise of dozens of silhouetted images projected on the wall behind. The images are largely of human figures engaging the natural landscape. And so the work takes on a fascinating sculptural dimensionality as it requires us to shift our physical orientation to it, to see it not just from the conventional front and center pictorial position, but from behind and underneath as well. It’s a powerful, pro-active metaphor for shifting our perspective on relationship with the natural landscape.

For that matter, it brings to mind the overall heft and beauty of this show (more comments to be offered soon in part 2) – a refreshing, thoroughly engaging conflation of tradition and innovation.

Photo, courtesy Canton Museum of Art: “Resurrection” by Heather Ujiie, on view through March 4, 2012, at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N. in Canton, Ohio. (330) 453 – 7666 www.cantonart.org

Wholly Holy Holydays

2011-12-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

Wholly Holy Holydays
By Tom Wachunas

“The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man…We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects – Hatred – Terror – Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.” -C.S.Lewis -

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” - John 20:29 –

Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished! - Luke 1:45 –

Today is Friday, December 23, the day before Christmas Eve. Years ago, my wife, Martha, told me that she calls this day “Christmas Adam.” It’s an endearing assignation, and not hard to figure out. Adam came before Eve. Today puts me in mind of first things first. Primary attentions. Priorities. So here’s a few thoughts on Christmas.

One particularly impactful essay by C.S. Lewis (quoted above), originally published in his 1970 book, “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics,” begins, “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” Lewis immediately follows the question by observing that it has “…a frantically comic side.” I’ve come to regard the wording of his observation as meaning ‘tragically ironic.’ He continues, “For the real question is not what are we to make of Christ, but what is He to make of us?”

In occupying my thoughts with great persistence over the past several weeks, this ‘real question’ is to me in many ways a real shame, if only because I pray on it too much just seasonally, or on Sundays, and not enough daily. Otherwise, I allow our terribly addled world to prey on my time and allegiances, thus too often making its priorities my own. Thinking about such things especially at this time of year is easy enough, even as it might smack of cookie-cutter religiosity or a hollow sense of tradition and spiritual ‘duty.’ Is the question one to be trotted out annually like a favorite Christmas bauble, only to be packed up and stored away until next year?

Additionally, throughout this Christmas season of 2011, I have often painted in my mind’s eye the image of a weary Jesus asking the world at large, “What have you made of Christmas?” And the only way for me to honestly respond is to daily come back to what, exactly, I am willing to let Jesus, my Creator and Lord, make of me. It is a matter far more urgent than just “keeping” Him as a great teacher, or feel-good abstraction of goodness in a season that bears His name. The truth, indeed the reality, is that He came to reveal, and keep ALL of us in, what he IS - living, unspeakably glorious Love, Joy, Hope, and Peace. Forever.

First things first. By His grace, believing IS seeing. May your eyes, then, be filled with the light of Jesus. Merry Christmas.

Photo: My 2011 Christmas oil painting/greeting card.

Accessing Ambiguities

2011-12-20T13:48:00.001-08:00

Accessing Ambiguities
By Tom Wachunas

“What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach…It is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it…Some questions are too painful to answer. Some questions we are unwilling to ask. And some are impossible to answer.”
- Artist Louise Bourgeois, from a 1988 interview with philosopher and critic Donald Kuspit –

“Joy and Departure” is the intriguing name of the current exhibit at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton, featuring paintings by Joe Martino and sculptures by Annette Yoho Feltes. If I read the statement that accompanies the list of works correctly, the thematic premise of the show is that both artists’ works here were intended to be seen together as somehow complementary in their departures from familiar reality so as to evoke unexpected joy and fascination on our part. In the process of putting the show together they have to some extent, in a few of their pieces, cross-fertilized each other’s work.

I can certainly see how “joy” might be one outcome of seeing Joe Martino’s pieces - as in the joy of encountering enthralling new visual structures in the context of scientific exploration. This isn’t surprising when considering that Martino is a retired teacher of chemistry and marine biology.

His mixed media abstractions are elaborate, heavily tactile, shimmering gatherings of forms - both geometric and irregular - that float in and on undulating fields of variable color, ranging from dark and earthbound to stunningly electric. Some of the forms look scraped on to, or out of, the surface, making for some delightfully ambiguous figure-ground passages. Other forms appear poured or spilled on to the surface in organic configurations that are often set off with elegant, thin contour lines of raised paint, as if mapping a topography.

These are complex and meticulous works, alternately suggestive of explosive astronomical events, astral clouds, and microbial minutiae. Telescopic and microscopic. With its often metallic iridescence, Martino’s nebulous geometry can be preciously decorative. But I don’t mean ‘decorative’ in any pejorative sense. Rather, his pictures are vibrant, intuitive celebrations of spectacles both familiar and wondrously mysterious.

And it is mystery, more than overt “joy,” that abounds in the sculptures by Annette Yoho Feltes. With various combinations of terra cotta, porcelain, rope, wire, and wood (among other materials), she makes objects that are (even at their most whimsical) invariably visceral and arresting. Feltes’ aesthetic is firmly rooted in solidarity with that of art world luminaries Louise Bourgeois, Magdalena Abakanowitcz, and Eva Hess. Feltes calls them her “saints.”

I can see why. Without being too blatantly derivative, what Feltes shares with those 20th century mentors of mixed media sculptures and installation art is a well-honed ability to let the juxtaposition of her chosen physical materials be intensely expressive of spirit and psyche. Particularly in her three freestanding works (“The Necessary Sacrifice,” “Fruitful,” and “A Mother of Two”), there’s a raw, even primal emotionality at work. These metaphorical constructions have the look of ritual objects, like ancient shamans’ ceremonial charms, that speak of vexing enigmas or pain. But there’s also an abiding sense of anticipation and promise, of impending arrivals, of conversations incomplete, literally hanging in the balance. Suspended thoughts. Her strange, bulbous forms might be carcasses or entombed nightmares. Then again, eggs, cocoons, or ripe fruit. Fertility and birth, harvest, mortality. Sublimated fears and anxieties, or channeled dreams?

In accessing and trusting their own experience of living, conscious and unconscious, contemporary artists will often leave us challenging ‘statements’ that stop in mid-sentence, as it were. Ambiguities and dichotomies in flux. Much of the “art experience” in this postmodernist era is in fact more dependent than ever upon us, the viewers, to resolve or at least sustain the dialogue. Annette Yoho Feltes’ ‘voice’ is a young but burgeoning and uniquely important one in our local arts milieu, and one that merits our continuing attentions.

“Joy and Departure” will be on view through January 14 at The Little Art Gallery, located inside the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton. (330) 499 – 4712, Ext. 312

Liquid Urban Light

2011-12-15T05:58:00.001-08:00

Liquid Urban Light
By Tom Wachunas

“Watercolour could have been used more by the modernists. It is so direct, and when the white paper convention is accepted, so powerful, even brutal, that it would seem an ideal medium.” – David Milne –

What would David Milne (who died in 1953), among Canada’s most prominent artists of the 20th century, make of the popularity and high visibility of watercolorists in our northeastern Ohio midst? Would he consider their work ‘modernist’ in the sense that I take the above quote to mean? Would he see a powerful, “even brutal” employment of the medium?

I’m sure that he would indeed encounter some truly original and engaging practitioners of the medium in our artistic population. To get there, though, he would have to wade through a preponderance of entrenched traditionalists. Not there’s anything necessarily insipid or invalid about the niceties of a tightly painted still life, floral arrangement, quaint seascape, or sentimental landscape. But quaint and sentimental is one thing. Saccharine and generic, no matter how well rendered, is quite another. Looking at exhibitions in these parts over the past 20 years, it seems to me that we’re remarkably heavy with lightweight and otherwise unremarkable watercolor painters.

Ted Lawson’s work decidedly does NOT fall into that demographic. Ample evidence is currently on view in his exhibit, called “A Moment in Time,” at the Canton Museum of Art. With the exception of two aquatic-themed images, all of the watercolor paintings here are cityscapes – some of Canton, but most of Manhattan.

All of these urban visions share a photographic sensibility in their soft detailing and in how the scenes have a viewfinder- in-the-moment sort of framing. This isn’t surprising, since Lawson does work from photographs. But what’s most uncanny is how his bold, luminous colors and fluid technique manifest light, imbuing his images with the plein air vibrancy and spontaneity so characteristic of the Impressionists. “Washington Square Park” is a stunning panorama of contrasted light. Wispy foreground trees hover over cars parked in the shade and pedestrians in silhouette, while the famous landmark arch and the city structures in the distance seem to shimmer in soft sunlight.

There’s also the matter of Lawson’s impeccable sense of design and composition, both in form and color distribution. While these pictures are certainly representational, they’re built upon seeing abstractly. Many of the scenes have an almost architectural dynamic in how visual textures are constructed, with concentrated areas of small details and shapes balanced against larger, more airy passages. In “Union Square Saturday,” the light is diffuse, befitting the rainy day depicted. A cluster of umbrella shapes moves rhythmically, as if dancing across the middle of the picture plane, floating in sharp counterpoint to the amorphous reflections glimmering on the wet pavement at the bottom.

For all of their liquid charm, the paintings nonetheless project a compelling, visceral immediacy. And occasionally even real drama, as in the aptly titled “Night Fever.” It’s a practically hallucinatory, furiously red vision of head light glare colliding with the sparkling metal of passing traffic.

These are exquisitely exciting impressions of transient episodes in city life. Lawson has managed to turn the clamor, clutter, and largeness of the urban milieu into a sublimely poetic visual experience. Interestingly enough, though his brushwork generally has little in common with that of Claude Monet, I’m still reminded of Monet’s abiding passion for translating light into form. The French master once observed, “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”

Simply necessary to love. For my part, with Lawson’s work, that’s a necessity – indeed an invitation - joyously met.

Photo: “Riding the Bike Lane” watercolor by Ted Lawson. On view through March 4, 2012, at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton (330) – 453- 7666
www.cantonart.org

Evocations: The Art of Martin Bertman

2011-12-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

Evocations: The Art of Martin Bertman
By Tom Wachunas

My first encounter with a Martin Bertman painting was in 2008 at Second April Galerie in downtown Canton. Call it a summoning. From 20 paces, a small piece called “Before Awakening,” one of the 25 Bertman works (oil, acrylic, watercolor, and mixed media) currently on view at the Canton Museum of Art, is a portrait that, despite being faceless, beckoned with great insistence. As if reconnecting with a long lost friend, I’ve been awakening to his work, caught in its mesmerizing thrall, ever since. And so it has truly been an honor and gift most memorable that I have had the opportunity to curate this show that I call “Evocations.”

Bertman’s configurations – some abstracted, some more clearly representational - reside in a place both primal and modern. Here, a raw primitivism and a pictorial refinement resonate with equal intensity - like dance partners entwined in an ever moving, passionate embrace. While it is apparent that a number of historic influences (Symbolist, Cubist, Surrealist, and Expressionist, to name some) are threaded throughout his ouvre, the artist has deftly personalized those sources and re-organized them into a unique, compelling visual vocabulary of intriguing motifs and emblems. Yet for all of its personal content and sometimes obtuse symbolism, this is an iconography that nonetheless evokes an accessible, deeply human spirituality.

Evokes what, exactly? ‘Human sprituality’ embraces a decidedly broad canvas, as it were, of painterly exploration. Bertman’s surfaces often have a tactile physicality, though not of the heavy impasto sort. His subtler brush strokes – whether sweeping and lambent (as in “O’Keefe’s Desert”), or mincing and stippled (as in “Moses”), are invested with energetic, gestural spontaneity. His imagery can be both familiar and approachable (“Cubist Still Life” and “Large Leaf,” for example), as well as inchoate and elusive (“Night Birth,” or “Light and Dark”). The most consistently abiding conceptual element throughout these pieces (representing approximately 20 years of work) though, is their narrative resonance. There are fascinating tales being “told” here, some with gravitas, some lilting and innocent. In that, Bertman is as much a thinker and storyteller as he is a painter. And these visual voicings revel in a superbly poetic language, generously imbued with potent mystique.

Look long enough, and I think you’ll feel somehow drawn to not just the artist’s private musings about being alive, but also into the rich milieu of collective human thinking about history, myth, and matters of the soul. Not so surprisingly, then, after you read Bertman’s statement posted with the exhibit, you would hopefully sense how these are indeed images a life-long teacher of philosophy could or would make.

Residing in many of Bertman’s works is a distinctly European aesthetic sensibility, often evoking the spirits of Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, or Henri Matisse, among others. And the color! Always the color – sumptuous, intense, vibrant like the Fauves, emotionally gripping like Van Gogh, playful like Picasso.

Yet always distinctly Bertman. Bertman the painter/ philosopher, the synthesizer, the weaver of tales. The celebrator of seeing. The sublime evocateur.

Photo: “Before Awakening” by Martin Bertman, on view at the Canton Museum of Art through March 4, 2012. More information at (330) 453 – 7666 and www.cantonart.org

Pressler at 87: Imprecise, but Passionate

2011-12-06T12:32:00.000-08:00

Pressler at 87: Imprecise, but Passionate

By Tom Wachunas

While there was nothing particularly ‘Christmasy’ about the program offered by the Canton Symphony Orchestra on December 4, the atmosphere in Umstattd Hall felt nonetheless distinctly festive and anticipatory of something very special. That would be, of course, the return of legendary pianist Menahem Pressler, last heard here in October, 2009, when his performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 was met with thunderous adulation.

And so it was that the first work on the program – Mozart’s Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio – was a rollicking call to attention, replete with joyous bursts of cymbals, triangle, and drums. It’s a scintillating, rambunctious piece, and the orchestra rose to the occasion with cheerful panache. In retrospect, the work demonstrated the orchestra’s crisp mastery in the percussion section, and heralded the more expansive, emotionally gripping percussive scope of the evening’s final selection.

In dramatic contrast to such a brisk start, the beginning of the program’s next entry, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, seemed like a whispered message - a simple four-note piano theme quietly delivered by Menahem Pressler. In its day, such an introduction was a daring departure from standard concerto openings, and served to establish a meditative commencement of an unfolding, ornate dialogue between piano and orchestra. As Kenneth C. Viant astutely observed in his program notes, Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto is the least “demonstrative” of his five piano concertos and “…one in which inward drama is favored over outward display.”

This doesn’t mean that the contemplative nature of the work isn’t without its technical challenges for the pianist – usually in the form of repeatedly intricate, cascading arpeggios. Presslers’s physical dexterity was less than optimal here. He is, after all, in his 87th year – all the more astonishing when considering he still conducts prestigious master classes and dazzles international concert audiences. Yet even as his performing mechanics may have been uneven, such imprecisions did little to diminish Beethoven’s compelling lyricism.

This was particularly apparent in the second movement, Andante con moto. The scoring is such that the initially heavy, dark-sounding strings are ultimately subdued, through a call-and-response sequencing, by the piano’s insistent, gently plaintive articulations. Throughout the movement, and then into the vivacious finale, Pressler’s playing exuded remarkable poeticism along with his own passionate enthrallment with the music, eliciting immediate, gleeful shouts of approval and a standing ovation from many in the packed auditorium.

Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann’s delightful penchant for convivial banter with the audience was in fine form as he introduced the next work on the program – Camille Saint-Saens’ symphonic poem, Le Rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel). He informed us that the second theme in the work had at one point become the theme music for a famous vintage radio program, and challenged anyone in the audience to identify the show. He awarded one woman a CD of his Vivaldi Four Seasons recording for correctly naming the 1930s serial drama, The Shadow.

Meanwhile, the shadowy theme in the Saint-Saens work actually represents the presence of Hercules, dressed as a woman, as he encounters Omphale, the Lydian Queen whom the gods had sentenced him to serve. The orchestra captured all the lush, subtle crescendos of this graceful work with sublime finesse, the strings stretching out Omphale’s spinning wheel thread into a single note - a high, achingly soft finale.

That ending was in turn an effective transition into the ethereal strings – conjuring dawn on a quiet sea - that began the evening’s concluding work, Claude Debussy’s evocative, powerful La Mer. Rarely have I heard a work so rich in orchestral textures, tempo variations, and fascinating timbres. This was Debussy’s monumentally ambitious and heroic interpretation of the sea in all its manifestations, visceral and airy. And I’ve never heard this orchestra so rapturously engaged in the moment – from the alternately sonorous and mellow strings and eloquent majesty of the brass, to the intensely sparkling swells of percussion and the bright, buoyant effervescence of the winds. More than just a stirring masterpiece of mimetic orchestration, this was a transcendent journey to remember.

Humbuggery and Grace

2011-12-04T10:30:00.000-08:00

Humbuggery and Grace
By Tom Wachunas

“Come in! Come in, and know me better, man!” -The Spirit of Christmas Present, from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (1843) –

This year marks the 30th anniversary production of “A Christmas Carol” by the Players Guild Theatre in Canton. Promoted as having enhanced special effects and music (this is the version with music by Steve Parsons and lyrics by John Popa, originated in 1997), I nonetheless considered bypassing the event.

I saw the show last year and raved about it. Lately, though, I’ve felt a dampening of the proverbial ‘Christmas spirit’, further jaded by the encroachment of newer national “traditions” such as Thanksgiving night camp-outs at retail stores in a growing readiness to greet the Spirit of Christmas Consuming. And the straw that broke the reindeer’s back, as it were, was the report of a bragging California woman who pepper-sprayed fellow customers in a mad fit of “competitive shopping.” Black Friday to be sure. Scrooges’ searing opinion of society’s dispossessed – “Are there no prisons?” - has yet a new application. Humbug to you all, I said. I fart in your general direction.

Fortunately I repented of such extreme cynicism – surely a Scrooge moment - and came to my senses long enough to revisit one of literature’s most treasured Christmas narratives, lovingly retold here by a 32-member cast under the joint direction of Joshua Erichsen and composer Steve Parsons (with assistance from Jeremy P. Lewis). The instrumental music alone, provided by an impeccably polished 11-piece orchestra, is robust and scintillating, able to lift even the Scroogiest heart. There’s a distinctly fresh luster, too, in the charming, energetic choreography by Michael Lawrence Akers.

Joshua Erichsen’s scenic design - with its thrilling fly effects, meticulously sculpted sets of 18th century architectural facades that swivel to reveal period interiors, and clever use of a trap door in the stage floor – brings remarkable dimensionality to the proceedings. But the real magic here is to be found in the songs, the singing, and the characters’ lively performances delivered by an inspired cast of truly professional quality.

Walter Shepherd is a warm and earnest Bob Cratchit, and his song, “A Child Alone,” with Zachary Charlick – delightfully authentic as Tiny Tim – is one of the evening’s most tender moments. Heartrending, too, is Amanda Medley in her role of Scrooge’s erstwhile love, Belle, who brings her sweetly riveting vocal finesse to the soaring ballad, “I Have to Know.” Also soaring, literally and otherwise, is Kelley Edington as the Ghost of Christmas Past as she flies and sings the ethereal “Wandering” with an incredulous-looking Scrooge in tow. And Justin Edenhofer is genuinely convivial as Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, while equally strong in his dual role of the young workaholic Ebenezer, particularly as he sings “Ten Minutes More.”

It’s pleasantly surprising to see a woman cast as the Ghost of Christmas Present. To that role, Eva Roberson brings a pure, passionate urgency tempered by child-like innocence. And speaking of children, young McKenzie Mack’s solo work in “Rogue’s Song (Shine a Light on Me)” is startlingly powerful.

The evening has several memorably funny and lighthearted scenes, among them the jaunty “Mister Scrooge” early in Act One, performed with quasi- vaudevillian glee by The Collecting Men trio of Austin Gantz, John Scavelli, and Andrew Knode. In Act Two they join forces with Tom Bryant (who also played Jacob Marley’s Ghost), Trisha Fites, and Linda Teis as a gang of scruffy grave robbers during the raucous and irreverent romp, “We Build Ourselves Up.”

A veteran of many Players Guild productions, the inimitable Don Jones reprises his role of Scrooge this year with a notably renovated authority. In fact, whereas last year some of his energy seemed at times under-developed (though not detrimentally so), this time around he invests his character with a substantially more vigorous animation and savory, credible pathos. When he’s mean, we shudder at his vitriol; when he’s remorseful, he breaks our hearts; when he’s redeemed, we’re giddy with elation right along with him. And did I mention his seasoned confidence? On opening night, the set was agonizingly slow and jerky as it rotated into Scrooge’s bedchamber encounter with Marley’s ghost. In a brilliantly hilarious ad lib, Jones, teetering slightly, handled the unscripted moment with endearing aplomb as he muttered, “Well, here’s an adventure…we must be having an earthquake.”

Adventure indeed, Jones’ performance, along with that of the entire cast, is an invigorating respite from the mundane, ever-growing absurdities and distractions that can suck the meaning – the joy and the hope - out of Christmas. Far from providing merely escapist entertainment, though, the Players Guild’s continuing faithful commitment to this classic story is a necessary and brave tradition of holding up a much-needed light, and an otherwise generous offering of artful grace in troubled times.

“A Christmas Carol – the new musical” at Players Guild Theatre, located in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Ave. North, in Canton. Shows through December 18 – Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $23 adults, $21 seniors 60+, $18 under 18, available through box office at (330) 453-7617, or at www.playersguildtheatre.com
Photo: illustration of Marley’s Ghost by John Leech from first edition of “A Christmas Carol” (1843)

A Mind's-eye View

2011-11-28T07:54:00.000-08:00

A Mind’s-eye View
By Tom Wachunas

My normal practice in reviewing art shows is to publish before the exhibit is closed, which is certainly helpful in bringing interested viewers to the gallery. Artists often tend to appreciate that kind of support, too. So it is with hat in hand that I offer my sincerest apology for being so late with this one. But the show in question, which closed on November 26 – “Women In Aprons” at Zygote Press in Cleveland - was just too sublimely memorable to fade away without some well-earned raving on my part.

The exhibit featured the printmaking works of two women - Hui-Chu Ying and Patricia Zinsmeister Parker – and its title seems to have derived in some part from Ying’s wall installation of 30 red fabric kitchen aprons, collectively titled “She Says,” tacked to one of the gallery walls. Each apron was embroidered with white script in phrases of a distinctly feminist character, such as “Give a woman a job she grows balls,” and “One woman can change anything.” But it is the relief monoprints in her Prayer Series where a remarkable pictorial magic is at work. Replete with delicate floral configurations and symbols from various religions, these lush prints, with their intricate fields of calligraphy punctuated by organic and representational forms, suggest elaborate embroidered prayer scrolls or ‘Oriental’ carpets, as well as delightfully meditative, abstracted landscapes.

The eleventh-hour drive to Cleveland was originally prompted by an invitation from Patricia Zinsmeister Parker to see her latest series of works made from rug liners (!) – those rubbery grid-like mats placed under area rugs to keep them from from slipping across smooth floors. Ten of her pieces here were in fact not prints per se, but layered ‘paintings’ mounted on black grounds, made from multiple mats, each a different bright, saturated color, while four of the pieces were monoprint collages – abstracts comprised of color fields printed directly from the rug liners. While nothing can compare to actually seeing these intriguing works up close and personal, the next best option is to spend time visiting her elegant web site, pzparker.com.

While Hui-Chu Ying’s prints certainly exude a clear, perhaps even conventional ‘sprituality,’ Parker’s are nonetheless invested with a contemplative if not more urbanized aura all their own. These slightly out-of-register grid configurations are grounds from which her forms and symbols (both familiar and irregular) rise, at once invading and evading our sense of equilibrium. It’s the visual co-existence of contrasting motifs that gives these works a sense of undulating drama, often with a sense of humor, as evidenced by such titles as “Cleveland Got Mojo,” “Central Park,” and “Swiss Bank Account.” Call it a street-savvy theatre on paper.

Parker’s ten painted assemblages pulse and undulate, too, with all the insistence of flashing neon lights against the black night. Yet interestingly enough, they’re not garish or off-putting, but exquisitely cerebral and subtle. These are quietly seething optical microcosms of compressed depth.

For a long while in viewing the show, “Women In Aprons” did suggest that ancient refrain, “…woman’s work is never done.” What continues to fascinate me about Parker’s evolving ouvre is its utter unpredictability, and her apparent unwillingness to settle too comfortably too long into a particular aesthetic. Never done indeed, she is in fact one woman who can change anything about her work. And she continues to do so with unflinching confidence, freshness, and daring.

Photo: “Clockwork Orange” monoprint collage by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker. pzparker.com

Instruments of Revelation

2011-11-23T10:48:00.001-08:00

Instruments of Revelation
By Tom Wachunas

“Some photographers take reality…and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.”
- Ansel Adams –

I recently eavesdropped on part of a conversation between several people discussing the efficacy of photography as fine art. They all seemed to agree that photography was a less “challenging” and “exciting” (those were their actual words) method for making “realistic” art than was painting or drawing. Examples of both Renaissance and modern painting masters were cited, including photorealistic (a.k.a. ‘Superrealism’) paintings by Chuck Close and Richard Estes. And there were several other comments about the admirable discipline it takes to skillfully render, in paint, something that’s so amazing in its fidelity to visible reality that it looks, interestingly enough…like a photograph. And well, duhh, ANYONE can take a picture of a sunset with a camera, they agreed, but it takes a “true artist” to make it convincingly like the real thing with a paintbrush.

Something told me I would be hard pressed to find any Jackson Pollock fans in this gathering. More to the point, I wondered if they had ever spent much time looking at the work of photographers such as Edward Steichen, Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, to name just a few historic champions of the medium. Turns out they hadn’t. As it was, I entered the discussion only long enough to mutter my disagreement, gently suggest that they were misinformed, and thank them for prompting what you are now reading.

Over the years I have encountered, to varying degrees, similar reluctance to regard photography as a “high art” form, as if it were an under-appreciated, perhaps even boring stepchild of true art. There are many reasons for this. Whether despite or because of postmodernist pluralism in matters of aesthetics, some still hold the reactionary view that the prime directive of two-dimensional art should be the faithful, albeit inspiring representation of the familiar, physical world. Entrenched conservatism, to be sure. Yet ironically, there is often folded into that viewpoint an accompanying, simplistic notion of photography being somehow too easy, unoriginal, ordinary. Point, click, and presto! - a picture.

Our world is inundated, indeed overwhelmed by instantly accessible visual information delivered via photographs. Rest assured I am aware that most people operating a camera are not artists as such (or shouldn’t claim to be) and are not setting out to make fine art, even as they may wow us with gee-whiz photo shop trickery. Still, one result of this ubiquitous plethora of pictorial data is that we can easily become desensitized and otherwise asleep in our ability to recognize (or even care?) what makes a great photograph and yes, great visual art. Like it or not, we have succeeded in designing and implementing a marvelous system for looking at too many pictures too fast… for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were. It’s increasingly difficult to separate the real gems from the costume jewelry.

Need a wake-up call? First, slow down. Then consider your time as well-spent in seeing the current exhibition of photographs, called “As I See It,” by Steve Ohman at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton. It’s a remarkably eclectic collection of 31 images, the majority of which are black-and-white. That alone places these pictures firmly in what can only be called a noble tradition that I hope never becomes obsolete. Though it might seem counter-intuitive, physical realities formalized in gradations of black to white - presented with the disciplined, masterful eye for the intricacies of light and texture that we see here - can be incomparably pure and powerful documents of life. Ohman’s landscapes in particular are delightfully memorable for their thoughtful formal composition as well as their distinctly poetic sensibility.

In Ohman’s hands, the camera, not unlike the painter’s brush, becomes a vehicle for translating the often seen and commonplace into the newly framed and revealed. Likewise, his photographs are sublime windows on the sheer intrigue and mesmerizing pleasure to be found in the very act of careful looking. In “taking pictures,” he gives back enthralling records of compelling earthly dramas.

Photo, courtesy Steve Ohman and curator Elizabeth Blakemore: “In the Distance” by Steve Ohman. On view THROUGH DECEMBER 11, at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton. Viewing hours 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. Monday – Thursday / 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Friday / 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. Saturday / 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. Sunday gallery@northcantonlibrary.org

Martial Meditations

2011-11-16T07:35:00.001-08:00

Martial Meditations
By Tom Wachunas

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” - Carl Sandburg –

“War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” - Thomas Mann –

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.” - Percy Byshe Shelley –

From the title of his solo show at Main Hall Gallery at Kent Stark – “Wounds of War” - to the titles of the individual drawings, paintings, and collage/assemblages, it’s clear that Fredlee Votaw means for his work to pluck at our heartstrings and speak to our spirits. Given the show’s hot-button subject of war, one intriguing quality here is its overall sense of contemplative calm and, in some cases, an almost stoic serenity.

These aren’t pictures of war’s bloody atrocities. No visual histrionics or gratuitous political diatribes. Collectively, most of the pieces here address the less obvious or sensationalistic - but all too real - pain of longing, isolation, and loss that war heaps upon its victims and participants. Much of the imagery seems to emerge from and float in white voids, as in the series of four drawings called “Thinking About Iraq.” Three of those feature an impeccably rendered pencil or pen portrait of a child juxtaposed with the American flag pictured as the all-too-familiar funereal blue triangle.

Other works are distinctly more visceral, with brooding, earthen colors and textured surfaces embedded with human figurative elements. Visceral too is the simple (though certainly not simplistic) and jarring “Flag of Honor,” a found American flag that’s clearly been through a fire.

Even without the title references to war, these works unabashedly exude real emotion – some more intensely than others. “Missing Her Soldier Daddy” is a wispy oil painting of a little girl, standing against the ghostly side of a house that fades away into empty white space, clutching a stuffed animal, peering at us from under an oversized cap with a look of sadness too heavy for her years.

Sentimental? Surely, depending upon your definition. These days, and for that matter, for decades now, the notion of sentimentality in contemporary art has often been met with disdain and even vitriol by art world intelligentsia. Votaw’s gentle brand of authentic reflection and nostalgic reminiscence is made all the more present, and indeed urgent, by his drawing and painting technique, which is nothing short of jaw-dropping in its clean precision of detail (though there are here a few genuinely interesting forays into looser abstraction). But I would submit to you that ‘sentimentality’ is a matter of relative degrees, and not intrinsically exclusive of appealingly provocative, relevant emotionality – which abounds in Votaw’s work. And so it is that I think there’s nothing vapid, clichéd, or mawkish about his aesthetic sensibilities.

Artsy aficionados who feel differently are just itchin’ for a fight.

Photo: “Missing Her Soldier Daddy,” oil on canvas, by Fredlee Votaw, on view through November 30 in the Main Hall Gallery (lower level of Main Hall) on the Kent Stark campus. Viewing hours are Monday – Friday 11:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m., Saturday 10:00 a.m. - Noon

Writes of Passage

2011-11-12T10:37:00.001-08:00

Writes of Passage
By Tom Wachunas

“Dear Bill, I came back to this wall again to see and touch your name. William R. Stocks. And as I do, I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother’s heart…” - from a letter written by Mrs. Eleanor Wimbish, mother of SP/5 William R. Stocks, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry, 198th Light Infantry Brigade, American Division, who was killed in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, February 13, 1969 –

It is important to me to tell you that even as I begin this commentary, I’m struggling to avoid sentimentalizing, sermonizing, or otherwise wearing my heart on my sleeve too much (which I fear I’ve already done with this sentence). But if I break my self-imposed rule here to never let you, the reader, sense my sweat and tears over composing a critique, I don’t mind telling you that today I just don’t give a rat’s derriere about journalistic form or etiquette.

My drive home last night (Veterans Day) from the opening performance of “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam” at the Kathleen Howland Theatre was eerily like my blackouts from darker days in another life, sans mind-altering substances. Yet I was indeed altered.

Not sure how I arrived home safely. Can’t remember traffic lights or the route. Only a flood of memories from 1968 to about 1971, some of which I’m not proud about. The infamous draft lottery of 1970. Panic. Plans to flee to Canada. Fear and loathing. The ‘Sturm und Drang’ of collegiate protests. The riots at my alma mater, Ohio State University. The May 4 mayhem and tragedy at Kent State. Heartbreaking conversations with bereaved parents and siblings of college chums who never returned from the bloodied, smoldering jungles of Asia. Words and faces that hadn’t crossed my mind with such jarring clarity for many years. Altered. Artful theatre will do that sometimes.

Phillip L. Robb directed this production that he adapted for the stage from the book of the same title. First published in 1987, the book was edited by Bernard Edelman, and was comprised of more than 200 letters written to families and loved ones by men and women who served in Vietnam. HBO produced an Emmy-winning documentary based on the book in 1988. Here, approximately 70 of the letters were read in alternating fashion, with genuine, often impassioned and startling sensitivity, by a solid six-member cast: Greg Emanuelson, Robert C. Fockler, Jim Long, Denise Robb, Rod Lang, and Jacki Dietz.

No fictions here. No ‘based-on-a-true-story’ speculations or saccharine dramatizations. No need for costumes or sound effects. The projected images on a sheet at the back of the stage, largely synchronized to echo content of the letters, are real photographs of real people fighting, flying, running, resting, hiding, hurting, dying, crying and yes, sometimes smiling. This is not so much war illustrated as war illuminated. War told by writeous warriors, as it were, who wrote with surprising eloquence of fear, loyalty, courage, love, confusion, anger, longing, and pride with searing intensity. War not as a vague memory, but made newly present through the dying art of letter-writing. And here, war read out loud by real people with heartbreaking reverence for the living and the dead.

There are too many truly moving passages in this performance – shared equally among the cast - to enumerate here. But two of them refuse to stop rattling in my memory. In one, late in the second ‘act’, Rod Lang, with steely, chilling determination in his voice, reads a letter from soldier Gregory Lusco, published in 1970 by a newspaper in Massachusetts. It’s an articulate but supremely blistering rant against the immoral, insensitive divisiveness and misplaced political sensibilities in this country at the time of the Kent State shootings - a soldier crying out for compassionate attention and respect for those who sacrificed their lives in Vietnam. An equally unforgettable moment (quoted at the beginning of this review) is the epilogue, wherein Denise Robb, with glassy-eyed pathos, effectively becomes the mournful mother who leaves letters to her son at the memorial where his name is etched.

Another memory during my drive home was of a popular poster during the volatile, heady Hippie days of my youth that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Now, while I’m sincerely grateful to have witnessed last night’s powerful and relevant remembrance, more than ever I’m thinking a better idea would be for us to forget how to do war altogether. To disappear it from our lives. To alter our minds forever. Call it a benevolent blackout.

“Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam” performances November 12, 18, and 19 at 8 p.m at the Kathleen Howland Theatre, located in Second April Galerie, 324 Cleveland Avenue North, downtown Canton. Tickets $10.00 for adults, $5 for students, senior citizens, and anyone with a public library card. ALL VETERANS ADMITTED FREE. To order call (330) 451 – 0924, or www.secondapril.org

Photo: the Cast – seated, left-to-right: Robert C. Fockler, Jacki Dietz, Jim Long / standing, l-r, Greg Emanuelson, Denise Robb, Rod Lang

Luminosities

2011-11-11T11:38:00.000-08:00

Luminosities
By Tom Wachunas

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.” - Blaise Pascal –

“We search for flares of existence and acknowledgement of being. Our mortality becomes glaringly obvious, as the world around us and those within it start to fade away. Peace is a visitor.” – Marti Jones Dixon, from her statement accompanying her painting, “Self at 50,” at Anderson Creative -

“…So it falls to us to illuminate, magnify, reveal.” - Craig Joseph, from “Dementia”, a written work in the exhibition “Into the Light” at Anderson Creative -

One way to embrace the function of art is to think of it as a metaphor for light. Or think of making and encountering art as a celebration of what light is and does. Here, I don’t mean art merely as well-crafted mimetic object – an imitation or illusion – but rather art in its ever-evolving, performative function to explore and reveal the essence of a person, place, thing, or thought. And if we consider light itself as that phenomenon which allows or inspires us to apprehend a physical or spiritual ‘reality’, art at its most powerful is an embodiment of that phenomenon, and a necessary one at that.

And so it is that Anderson Creative continues to mount courageous, innovative, and yes, enlightening thematic exhibitions that are compelling expansions of the purposes and practices of conventional galleries. The current show – called “Into the Light” - features seven local artists who have embraced the subject of light, literally and symbolically, and who collectively provide a deeply meditative and elaborate sensory experience for the viewer.

The gallery has been made over into three separate, intimately appointed rooms, each focused on a particular aspect of interpreting the idea of light – as a physical entity, a manifestation of spirituality and myth, and attaining enlightenment/awareness in matters of mortality and afterlife.

Marcy Axelband’s large painting, “Sometimes Light Is Dark,” is a stunning, very red abstract diptych. Its loose, sweeping strokes intertwine to form a kind of wrinkled texture – a symbol, perhaps, of the rarefied act of seeing. The markings seem to be simultaneously congealing and dispersing, all bristling with a painterly muscularity reminiscent of Willem De Kooning’s urgent expressionism. Lynn Digby’s portraits and landscapes here are easily among her most dramatic and well-painted in recent memory. Her “Lana’s World” is at once telling and eerily silent, with its distant fires burning in the murky night, yet oddly hopeful in its suggestion of a transcendent light source outside the picture plane. The light in Marti Jones Dixon’s powerful, four-section self-portrait, “Self at 50,” is uncompromising in its harsh exposure of progressive aging – a force that sculpts mortality. And Michele Waalkes’ elegant digital prints are masterfully subtle, gentle visions of forms and shadows in ghostly light.

Speaking of ghostly light, filmmaker Andrew Rudd’s “Shadows of Progress” is a haunting, wispy video projection of the headlights from cars reflected on his living room walls, passing by in a mesmerizing, somewhat lonely procession of luminous streaks. In a similarly contemplative, poetic spirit, Craig Joseph’s written works are poignant reflections on significant, even cathartic moments and circumstances, wherein ‘light’ is the realization of some personal truth.

A notably sublime addition to this exhibit is the recorded original music by Paul Digby. It’s a sumptuously orchestrated aural backdrop, classical and Romantic in emotional sensibility, and otherwise achingly beautiful in its often reverential, hymn-like lyricism and rich choral textures.

This show is yet one more remarkable example of Anderson Creative's unique nurturing of art as a fully cognitive journey into perception. I’m reminded that on one level, we see a thing only because of the light it reflects. Yet in its reflecting, the thing seen becomes a light in itself, inspiring and illuminating our imagination. Here, we viewers are encouraged to be more than passive observers of static objects. Rather, we enter the possibility of becoming collaborators in creation, to better know our own inner light.

Photo, courtesy Anderson Creative, “Lana’s World,” oil, by Lynn Digby. On view at Anderson Creative through November 26 at 331 Cleveland Ave. NW, downtown Canton. Hours are Noon – 5p.m. Wed.-Sat.
www.andersoncreativestudio.com

A Poignant, Curious War Remembrance

2011-11-08T05:37:00.000-08:00

A Poignant, Curious War Remembrance
By Tom Wachunas

It is certainly no surprise that great symphonic music, when delivered by orchestras as generally impressive as the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO), can be edifying on a strictly cerebral and technical plane. But I was also reminded by the CSO concert on November 6 that there’s real magic in how an orchestra can woo our hearts and evoke powerful emotions, even when questionable program content and order might undermine their momentum.

The thematic backdrop for this occasion was a commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. While the evening’s opening work – Verdi’s Overture to “La Forza Destino (The Force of Destiny)” – is not about any particular war as such, the opera does embrace a somber theme of fated human affairs. The orchestra negotiated the overture’s intertwined motifs of brooding foment and lighter-hearted meditation with notably vibrant energy, setting a stirring enough tone for what followed – Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Still, given the solemn, percussive booming that opens this iconic work, and the ensuing thrill of the electrifying brass, I wonder now if the concert would have been better commenced with this compelling call to attention, as the orchestra handled it with truly inspiring panache. The heroic nobility of the work was augmented by the artistry of James Westwater, who has forged a distinguished career in integrating live symphonic music and multiple, monumentally-scaled photo projections in a form he calls “photochoreography.”

Classical purists might object that such added theatricality is as unnecessary as it is distracting. While I found the synchronized pulsing of the projected images to be visually mesmerizing and emotionally stunning in “Fanfare,” and even more so during the performance here of Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” the effect did seem more like an afterthought in both Pachelbel’s “Canon” and Philip Glass’s “Interlude No. 1 from the CIVIL warS.”

The Glass work was originally written as a connecting segment between scenes in Act V of an ambitious collaborative project with Robert Wilson, from 1984, that was never presented live in its entirety. Its inclusion in this setting could reasonably be regarded as a metaphor for the calm before, or after, a battle. Unlike some of Glass’s more strident pieces, this very short work is hypnotically serene in its simplicity. It was played here with a hushed sensibility that, once again, effectively set up our anticipation of Copland’s majestic “Lincoln Portrait.”

This was arguably the most deeply moving performance of the evening, further embellished by the arresting photographs from the Civil War that hovered above the orchestra like so many shifting storm clouds. Christopher Craft’s text narration, which the composer built largely from Lincoln’s letters and speeches, was both poignant and commanding, and made all the more compelling by the orchestra’s final explosive note – a victorious exclamation delivered with the deafening clarity of a cannon blast.

After such impactful drama, it seemed a curious choice at this point to insert Pachelbel’s “Canon.” Peace after the war? Possibly, though a somewhat toothless peace at that. While the familiarity of the work certainly didn’t breed anything contemptible, the understated performance here was simply too ordinary for an orchestra of this caliber.

Similarly, in the concert’s final work – Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”) – the orchestra was at times uninspired. For all of the first movement’s rhythmic and melodic verve, the normally invigorating resonance of the strings seemed uncharacteristically lackluster, and at other points through the work perhaps even a bit out of tune. Fortunately, such quirks were overcome by the vigorous, authoritative reading of the ebullient, propulsive finale.

Particularly captivating throughout the evening was the animated demeanor of CSO Associate Conductor Matthew Brown at the podium. His is a delightfully articulated and endearing physical commitment to the music, here emanating an uncanny sense that he literally held the orchestra – and the audience - in the palms of his hands.

Photo, by Jeremy Aronhalt, www.matthewbrownconductor.com: Canton Symphony Orchestra Associate Conductor Matthew Brown

Echoes of a Scream

2011-11-06T06:34:00.001-08:00

Echoes of a Scream
By Tom Wachunas

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” – Bertrand Russell –

Even the earliest moments of “Plumfield, Iraq”, the season-opening production at Kent State University at Stark Theatre, augur tragedy. A group of young men and women, running in formation to a lively military cadence call, morphs into a frolicsome gathering of high school buds playing touch football. Someone named Cam is missing from the fun. Cam’s best friend, Mike, gently pleads with the group to wait just a little while longer before going their separate ways and getting on with their day. Indeed, with their lives.

What unfolds, then, is a war tale, a “memory drama” written by Barbara Lebow - here with Brian Newberg directing a youthful, remarkably skilled eight-member cast - that takes place in the guilt/grief-riddled mind of Mike, suffering from a very protracted case of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). He is our lens on simple, innocent life in the fictional small town of Plumfield, Washington, and on the harrowing battlefield of Iraq. It is a lens at once crystal clear and fogged over by the vapors of horrific memories.

Without ever succumbing to ideological axe-grinding, grandstanding, or gratuitous preaching, Lebow’s play is nonetheless an uncompromising look at the awful democracy of war. No respecter of age, gender, politics, or nationality, and with cruel equanimity, it leaves in its wake usurped dreams, wrecked psyches, and otherwise arrested lives. It’s the chaotic contrast between Mike’s nostalgic remembrances of Plumfield pleasantries and his searing wartime flashbacks that drives the story, starting with his reluctant decision to enlist in the Army along with Cam, both fresh out of high school. They’re sent to Iraq, still under a delusion that the worst of the war, initially celebrated for its brevity, was over. They envision returning to the lives and loves they left behind, with their Veteran benefits assuring a college education. Cam would pursue a business career, and Mike a life in music.

There is essentially no physical stage set, and minimal props. In this somber atmosphere, “scenery” is delivered via light effects along with still and moving images projected on the large back wall painted to look like stone. Real war footage is generously interspersed with poignant snapshots and videos of the characters’ laptop missives to each other.

Anthony Antoniades’ portrayal of Mike is for the most part successful in its volatile balance between his character’s gentle nature and his clear horror at what transpires in Iraq. He’s shell shocked, literally and figuratively. At times he’s twisted into a fetal, defensive silence, locked inside overwhelming shadows of loss, failure, and guilt. It’s all a compelling counterpoint to the more ostentatious, confident nature of Cam, played with eminently credible, affectionate gusto by Matt King.

Both Erin Stewart, as Cam’s newlywed wife, Lorraine, and Devonn Patterson, playing Mike’s girlfriend, Beth, bring genuine tenderness along with palpable, bittersweet urgency to their scenes of trying to draw Mike out of his torturous memories. To rejoin the living.

Given all of the story’s sharply and powerfully defined images of psychological and emotional trauma, the play’s final moment of Mike climbing the stairs out of his basement is somewhat ethereal (and maybe for some, unsatisfying) and enigmatic. Is it a flashback, a dream, a goodbye to his life, a promise, a prophecy?

Call it an ascension, then. From the (de)basement of war’s damnable malignancy, to the possibility of curative atonement. Amid echoes of lingering hope.

“Plumfield, Iraq” curtain times are November 10 (Thursday) and 12 at 8 p.m. / November 6 and 13 at 2:30 p.m. in the Kent State University at Stark Theatre, Fine Arts Building. Tickets are $10 for adults and $7 for senior citizens and students 16 and younger. To order, call (330) 244 – 3348 or visit www.stark.kent.edu/theatre

Photo: “Echoes of a Scream” enamel on wood by David Alfaro Siquieros, 1937

First Let's Kill All the Critics?

2011-11-03T14:51:00.001-07:00

First Let’s Kill All the Critics?
By Tom Wachunas

“We keep lowering the bar as to what makes acceptable, good, or great art. These days, many regard all art as somehow sacrosanct and above reproach, if only because it is the unique product of human hands and personal passions. This kind of thinking continues to generate an increasingly shallow democracy of ideas that is slowly obliterating art.” – June Godwit, from “The Third Entity” (1975) –

Prompted to some degree by recent comments posted to my review of the Stark County Artists Exhibition at the Massillon Museum, what follows is not an apology, defense, or even clarification, but rather questions relevant to - in varying degrees (and in no particular order) - making, appreciating, and interpreting art. Questions that are intrinsic to the discipline – yeah, I said discipline - of critique.

Are all opinions about art of equal value? Who is qualified to assess the quality or meaning of art? What constitutes an “informed” opinion? Is knowledge of art history useful in discussing and/or evaluating contemporary art? Why or why not? Are the writings of Plato and/or Aristotle on art and aesthetics still useful or applicable in discussing contemporary art? Why or why not? What is the role of the artist in the 21st century? Is it global or culture-specific? Has the artist’s role changed since the 20th or 19th or 18th centuries? How? What is the role of the art critic in the 21st century? Who is qualified to be an art critic? Do we need art critics? Why do we make art? Why do we look at it? Why should we care about art? By what standards do we assess the success or failure of a work of art? Who established/establishes those standards? Must a work of art, or an artist, be accountable to any standards? Should art advance or enhance our thinking about living, human nature, or morality? Who and what defines “bad taste”? Who or what defines “serious” or “high” art? What exactly is “low brow” or kitsch? Are these designations intrinsically “bad”? Does great art create its own tastes? Does bad art perpetuate bad taste? Is “originality” a fixed concept, or a matter of degrees? What constitutes “beauty”? Should beholders of art strive to improve their vision? Who or what contributes to that improvement? What do we expect of our art and artists? Should we expect anything at all? Can art alter societal mind–sets, or merely reflect them? Do you see art as escapist entertainment, or enlightenment? Can “serious” art be both?

I eagerly await your comments.

Photo: “Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp, 1917

Hard Corps

2011-10-31T08:44:00.001-07:00

Hard Corps
By Tom Wachunas

The William G. Fry Theatre is a classic ‘black box’ venue that’s a great fit for the Canton Players Guild “Stripped Away” series. Without the elaborate sets and other trappings of full-out mainstage productions, the series is designed to bring an edgy immediacy to the theatrical proceedings. In such a tightly confined environment, if the stage literature is sufficiently compelling, if the directing is sensitive and purposeful, and if the performers are skilled enough to convincingly sustain their characters under very close audience scrutiny, the results are intensely riveting.

And so it is that these elements have certainly been blended to powerful effect in the current production of “A Few Good Men,” directed here by Jeremy P. Lewis. Aaron Sorkin wrote this story of two Marines – Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and PFC Louden Downey - accused of murdering a fellow soldier, PFC William Santiago, in a “Code Red” hazing gone wrong at Guantanamo Bay, and their JAG defense lawyers who uncover a conspiracy to cover up high-level complicity. The play was produced on Broadway in 1989 and then as a film directed by Rob Reiner in 1992, starring Tom Cruise and Demi Moore as attorneys Daniel Kaffee and Joanne Galloway, and Jack Nicholson as the Guantanomo base commander, Nathan Jessep.

The action flips back and forth across time in both Washington, D.C., and the Guantanamo base, with many scene changes (a matter of quick rearrangements of a few furniture pieces) dispatched by the cast members with appropriately military precision, even if the long first act does seem to, at times, crawl instead of march. For the most part, the cast appears as very well-directed and credible (right down to their buzz-cuts) in martial authenticity – no doubt aided by three of the performers who had considerable real life experience in U.S. military service.

Stand-out performances include: Ryan Skibicki playing the accused Harold Dawson - the idealistic, stalwart Marines’s Marine; Shane Daniels playing fellow prisoner Louden Downey – shaken, needy, and with the demeanor of a deer in the headlights; John Scavelli as the wry-witted Sam Weinberg, best friend and second chair to defense counsel Kaffee, sincerely struggling to buy into defending what he considers to be a cut-and-dry case of murder. And John Green is scarily artful in his portrayal of Lt. Jonathan Kendrick, marching to his own Bible-thumping beat as he and his underlings robotically bark the Marine Code, “Unit, Corps, God, Country!”

As is often the case with plays made into popular films, iconic screen performances can prejudice our expectations of the stage experience. But here you can forget about such measuring sticks as Tom Cruise’s suave bravado, Demi Moore’s unflappable dignity and fortitude, or Jack Nicholson’s fanatical, square-jawed, vein-popping courtroom crash-and-burn as he bellows, “You can’t handle the truth!”

This cast delivers all that plus some, with dramatic elan all their own. Ryan Nehlen turns in a deeply energetic and nuanced portrait of the callow defense lawyer Daniel Kaffee, hiding deep insecurities with cocky humor that ultimately matures into a convicted conscience. Equally intriguing is Maria Work as co-counsel Joanne Galloway – impassioned, quietly vulnerable, and endearingly stubborn. And Fred Weibel captures the pathological malevolence and megalomania of Nathan Jessep – a frightening embodiment of the chasm between autonomous military bureaucracy and societal morality - with gripping panache.

Take no prisoners indeed. Handle the truth? This is theatre that demands - and gets – our undivided attention.

Canton Players Guild production of “A Few Good Men” runs through November 13. Performances are 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday in the William G. Fry Theatre, located in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Avenue N., in Canton . Box office (330) 453 – 7617, www.playersguildtheatre.com

PHOTO by James Dreussi: Left to Right – Bill Finley (background) as Judge Julius Alexander Rudolf, Fred Weibel as Nathan Jessep, Ryan Nehlen as Daniel Kaffee, John Scavelli as Sam Weinberg

When Art Gets In Your Eyes

2011-10-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

When Art Gets In Your Eyes
By Tom Wachunas

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. - Ecclesiastes 1: 9-10 –

“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.” - Voltaire –

“Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” - Pablo Picasso -

Regarding the latest installment of the annual Stark County Artists Exhibition at the Massillon Museum, I’m almost convinced that the jurors of competitive shows (in this region anyway) are required to always select a few works that intentionally strain credibility – theirs and ours. This year’s What Were They Thinking Award goes to Laurie Baker for her two paper mache sculptures: “Scary Winter Snowman” and “Full- Size Sitting Tiger”. These are simplistic, somewhat garish tchotchkes, though certainly very impressive in scale and craftsmanship. Part of the problem might be with the Museum’s practice in the last few years of jurying digital-only entries. Maybe the pieces are somehow more appealing encoded on a shiny disc and illuminated on a computer screen. Like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get until you free it from its wrapper. As seen here, they’re cute and “entertaining”, but only to the extent that circus kitsch is best presented on parade floats.

A few other pieces bring up interesting questions about “originality” and appropriation of imagery not one’s own. Billy Ludwig’s “Bird Shark” is a digital image that won Second Place honors here. Imagine my surprise when fellow blogger Judi Krew informed me that her internet-savvy son noticed how Ludwig’s delightfully bizarre frankenform of a seagull and Great White was eerily similar to several images found under “bird shark” on Google Images. In fact, but for the photo-shopped background and webbed feet in Ludwig’s picture, the critters are virtually identical. IF it was someone or some entity other than Ludwig (or his personal Impale Design brand) that originally created the Google images, shouldn’t they be credited? Ludwig and many other digital artists make no secret of incorporating “found” imagery for works that bear their names. So are we OK with assuming that anything and everything on the internet, with little or no alteration, is fair game for inclusion in art, or legitimately in the public domain enough to be fodder for the contemporary art trough? How thin is the line between homage and forgery? Between an original and a counterfeit?

Related questions are posed by James Begert’s oil painting here called “War”. His piece is an instantly recognizable appropriation of an Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup can from 1962, and truly needs no introduction or credit, being the emblematic icon of an entire art movement. Begert’s borrowing, though, is a much clearer recontextualizing of his “found” source than that of some digital artists. Eschewing Warhol’s cool industrial surfaces, Begert’s more impromptu, painterly treatment is an effectively crude awakening to 21st century marketing and consumerism of war.

But enough with the thorny stuff. As a whole, this year’s showcase of 62 works by 41 artists is notably more balanced than in years past - in variety of mediums (including more 3-D works), engaging thematic content, and depth of technical mastery. It’s gratifying, too, to see that the echoes of the Old Masters can still hold us in their thrall. Frank Dale’s stunning “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” garnered Best In Show honors. His unquestionable mastery of the Flemish method of oil painting is in full force with this shadowy portrait of his late wife and muse. A ghostly wisp of cigarette smoke rises up her cheek and lingers over her left eye like a haunting scar. One of Dale’s accomplished students of the technique, Kristin Lupsor, received an Honorable Mention for her sumptuous, riveting portrait, “Flora”.

There’s a captivating sensuality about the two excellent still lifes by Karen Hemsley. The picture planes are intricately engineered with contrasting patterns and diagonals, unusual perspectives, and a rich palette. Deliciously mesmerizing. So too the acrylic collage by Isabel Zaldivar called “Landscape in Black and White”. It’s a fascinating abstract exploration of lavish textures and organic forms laid out with an almost photographic clarity, suggesting a churning natural environment. A similar textural intrigue abounds in the exquisite color photograph of the gnarled base of a tree, “Sleepy Old Ent”, by Scott Alan Evans.

Here’s a short list of other entries that I found particularly remarkable: the vibrant pastel pieces by Diane Belfiglio, Judy Huber, Judi Krew, and Brian Robinson ( Juror’s Honorable Mention); the wondrously tactile fiber portrait by Marge May; the equally wondrous stoneware pieces by Laura Donnelly (Third Place for “Dish Rags”); and the elegant wood vessels by Marty Chapman.

And for the sheer power of art’s capacity to “speak” with electrifying authority, there are the two acrylic paintings by Sherri Hornbrook: “Lux” and “Visor”. My dilemma is that I’m at a loss to explain exactly what’s being said. Stumped. Flummoxed. Yet absolutely sure I’m seeing something really fresh. Yes, there are apparent derivations in these abstracts – a melding of Fauvist color with the loose expressivity and design sensibilities of such painters as Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, to name just some. But Hornbrook offers a compelling synthesis all her own – private, enigmatic, intensely intuitive. PRIMAL. They pose questions. I want to see them bigger. Maybe next time around. Meanwhile they linger, sweet and loud. Art will do that sometimes.

Photo: “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes”, oil by Frank Dale, on view at the Massillon Museum THROUGH DECEMBER 31. 121 Lincoln Way E., downtown Massillon. (330) 833 – 4061 www.massillonmuseum.org

Probing Personhood

2011-10-22T06:39:00.001-07:00

Probing Personhood
By Tom Wachunas

The current exhibit at Anderson Creative is an intriguing exercise in human connectivity that I think is one of the most deeply thought provoking projects to come our way since the gallery’s inception. Called “Blind / Sighted: The Perceptions Project,” the installation presents an unfolded process involving nine local residents - of varying ages, backgrounds, and walks in life – who answered probing questions in an hour-long interview, conducted by Anderson Creative curator Craig Joseph, about how they perceive themselves and how they think others perceive them. Then transcripts of the recorded interviews were turned over to two artists: painter Marti Jones Dixon and filmmaker Andrew Rudd. Based solely on those audio recordings, Dixon was assigned the task of painting a portrait of each individual, while Rudd set about storyboarding nine brief films (“microdocumentaries”) about their lives.

Rudd had the advantage of meeting each of his subjects face-to-face for a short time in the process of finishing his project, and we’re told in the accompanying background statements for the show that those meetings generated changes in his original storyboarded perceptions. I take it to mean that, based on his interpretation of the audio interviews, Rudd at first envisioned particular ways to present a comprehensive ‘picture’ of his subjects. Then he must have realized he needed to re-think his perceptions after getting to know them a little better. In his attempt to portray the essence of a person – to present who he thought these people are - he likely grappled with freeing his art enough to be a faithful descriptor of transient realities rather than just a pre-scripter of static ideas, or merely coloring in the lines, so to speak, provided by the initial interview questions (which are posted on one of the gallery walls), and the interviewees’ answers.

In any event, his finished films are lively and sensitive in their construction. Each is a uniquely engaging tableau of a life, giving us intimate views of these erstwhile strangers. We learn, among other things, something of their memories, families, values and passions as well as their physical appearance – something Dixon could not access in her decisions as to how to paint portraits of them.

The challenge forced her to relate to and render her subjects in a totally unfamiliar way. As an accomplished portraitist accustomed to working from visual cues in real time, Dixon’s paintings have always effectively captured her subjects’ subtlest nuances of countenance and postures with truly energetic, facile brushwork. But for these paintings, she needed to engage a new methodology by literally hearing her way into seeing – to intuit a sense of a whole person emerging from a “framed” narrative. While the paintings don’t reveal physical faces as such, they are nonetheless imbued with an almost mystical, beatific look that reads, when viewed in tandem with the subjects’ respective films, as somehow apropos. Most of her pictures suggest illuminated discoveries of present essences, or perhaps truths retrieved from deep contemplation, revealed in ethereal, sometimes haunting light. Many take the form of interior scenes that in turn frame an exterior scene. Savory, private moments in an outward-bound journey. In their expressive technique, and in their poetic content, these works may well be the most compellingly dramatic Dixon has ever made.

What I find most engaging about this show is the relationship between what is overtly declared about the nine “strangers” - Scott, Blu, Hugo, Kristin, Moe, Henry, Lindsey, Marian, and Aunt Bea (as I’m left with a warming desire to know them better still) - and what it tells me about the artists. As viewers, we necessarily become vicarious participants in their process, but only to the extent to which we invest our time to sincerely explore our own perceptions. More important, in as much as the show is a presentation of individual portraits and biographies, it is collectively a laudable, courageous, and affirming picture of humans authentically willing to do what is too often dreadfully absent from this world: connect with each other.

Photo, courtesy Marti Jones Dixon and Anderson Creative: “Hugo”, oil on canvas, on view THROUGH OCTOBER 29 at Anderson Creative, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery hours are Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Where Sparrows Breathe Fire

2011-10-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

Where Sparrows Breathe Fire
By Tom Wachunas

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

-from “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” by Lewis Caroll -

Welcome to where honey grows on trees, ravens drive trucks, owls turn mice into living marionettes, cats have wings and webbed feet, and catfish parachute into fiery battle. Not to mention where beetles have bulldozer snouts and long-necked, three-horned elephants play croquet, among many other surreal permutations of the known universe. Welcome to Erin through the picture plane, aka “The Life of a Dream,” an exhibit of paintings by Erin Mulligan currently at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton.

Beyond what I’ve already offered here on several occasions in the last few years, there isn’t much in the way of new observations or insights I can offer about Mulligan’s work. This isn’t to say she’s been making the same painting over and over again – a practice not uncommon among some painters who settle for years on end into a comfortable stylistic niche. Yes, she continues to produce utterly intriguing and meticulous visions of an improbable – OK, impossible - world that is alternately bizarre and whimsical, yet without being too dark or repulsive. But Mulligan’s looking glass is a window on a world that’s apparently boundless in its enthralling variety of content. These are fantastic visions in every sense of the word – phantasms of places and creatures that at times seem to be allegories of “real world” situations.

Even aside from the symbolism that may or may not be present, they’re compelling for their unfettered surrender to an astonishingly fertile imagination, as well as their equally astonishing technique. Merging the detailed draftsmanship of the most accomplished nature illustrators with the classic glazing methods of the Old Masters, Mulligan is both a first-rate painter and a master illusionist in her own right. Combined with the playful taxonomic nomenclature of her titles – like “Flatus Swimmey Linearani,” “Insectus Scoopus Mammalus,” and “Flightus Amphibious Delicious” – these works are delightfully credible and entertaining documents of life lived...somewhere else.

So go ahead, have breakfast with the Queen. I bet you’ll believe a lot more than just six impossible things before you’re finished.

Photo, courtesy The Little Art Gallery: “Cosmos Umbilicus,” oil on board by Erin Mulligan, on view through November 6 at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library. Also on view, original vintage jewelry designs by Kathleen Houston. gallery@northcantonlibrary.org
(330) 499 – 4712, Ext. 312

Liszt Ablaze, Stravinsky Explosive

2011-10-11T05:26:00.000-07:00

Liszt Ablaze, Stravinsky Explosive
By Tom Wachunas

For sheer depth of instrumental virtuosity and soaring emotional impact, the inaugural performance of the 2011-2012 season by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) on October 9 was more than merely satisfying. This concert was an aural phenomenon of astonishingly lavish dimensions.

Maestro Gerhardt Zimmerman introduced to the audience American composer Margaret Brouwer, whose 1996 tone poem, Remembrances, began the program. She explained that the work was written after the death of Robert Stewart, a beloved friend who was himself a composer as well as a sailor. After the inspired performance, Zimmerman welcomed Brouwer back to the stage, and she was clearly pleased – with good reason - at what had just transpired.

Here was the CSO at its most evocative, deftly sailing, so to speak, through the score’s many sparkling textures and variable moods that powerfully conjured images of windswept seas, alternately soothing and achingly mournful. Most remarkable was the commanding finesse with which the orchestra navigated the score’s dramatically evolving and contrasting sound dynamics – from the very loud and solemn, and to the ultimately shimmering whispers of hope and affirmation. Throughout, particularly in haunting passages that suggested the rumble of looming storms, the brass section was sharp and utterly riveting.

What followed was surely among the most searing performances by a guest soloist in recent memory. Pianist Martina Filjak delivered a blazingly hot performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1, startling for both its vigorous lyrical thunder as well as its silky poeticism. In his program notes for the concerto, Kenneth C. Viant cited Austrian critic Moritz Saphir’s description of Liszt treating the piano as a mistress. Just so, on this occasion Filjak was the personification of Liszt’s impassioned relationship with the instrument, playing as if at once attacking and apologizing to a lover. Call it a tender savagery. But even in passages of the most furious and sturdy muscularity, she never succumbed to gratuitous bombast. Rather, her astounding virtuosity was purposeful, and always in seamless, balanced dialogue with the sonorous orchestra. Particularly magical – even wicked - were her sustained right hand trills that transformed the piano’s sound into otherworldly, harp-like resonances. When the bedazzled capacity audience lavished her with their loving ovations, she graciously responded with an equally magical encore of Schumann’s Intermezzo from Vienna Carnival.

The overarching theme of the evening was a celebration of Liszt’s 200th birthday, and so a second work by the composer – Symphonic Poem No.7 (Festklange) - filled in the program further. While the march-like, glimmering energy of Festklange (‘Festival Sounds’) might lack the heroism or gravitas of some of Liszt’s other symphonic poems (a genre he invented), it was nonetheless delivered here with towering, palpable exuberance. Once again, the brass section was exceptionally bright and crisp, along with notable solos from cello, bassoon, and violin. In all, the work set the tone for a concert finale as explosive as I’ve ever heard at Umstattd Hall.

The music for the The Firebird ballet electrified audiences when it premiered at the Paris Opera in 1910, and effectively thrust Stravinsky into worldwide celebrity practically overnight. The 1919 suite arrangement stands in many ways as Stravinsky’s recapitulation – summation, to be sure – of 19th century Russian orchestral opulence. It is unarguably a masterpiece of technical flamboyance and wildly varied, mesmerizing instrumental textures. Through all of the CSO’s thrilling mastery of this familiar gem, there was of course the anticipation of its stirring, iconic finale. Yet here the orchestra far exceeded such familiarity and somehow transcended the whole idea of exhilarating, victorious climax. This was a jaw-dropping, exuberant eruption of the first order. And more than just a joyous end to a singularly excellent evening, it heralded in glorious fashion the robust season to come.

Photo: Pianist Martina Filjak

Mattermorphoses

2011-10-08T05:44:00.001-07:00

Mattermorphoses
By Tom Wachunas

Aegolius had worked himself into one of his famously flustered states. This was always the case whenever he visited an exhibit of what he called ‘postwhatsit’ art. “Well, I’ve never seen anything quite this,” he blurted, as usual, “…and, well, I mean anything I could call…” His whiny voice trailed off into indecipherable muttering.
Nyctea stroked his shoulder gently and, as usual, cooed, “Relax. It’ll come to you.”
After a few more minutes of nervous pacing and squinting at the strange works, a wide-eyed Aegolius finally screeched, “Metamatters and matterphors!”
And just as she had done countless times before, Nyctea nodded her agreement. “Perfect,” she said.
- From “Mournings of the Grebes” by June Godwit –

Despite his habitual worrying, Aegolius never failed to eventually unpack his trusty portmanteau. In the current postwhatsit exhibit at Main Hall Gallery on the Kent Stark campus, mixed media works by five women are gathered under the title “Pleasures of Matter.” Metamatters and matterphors indeed, the peculiar objects presented here are ‘pleasurable’ enough in their tactile intrigue, to the extent that we find pleasure in interpreting iconography that vacillates between things enigmatic, personal, and somehow familiar.

For example, the curious fabric floor constructions by Kortney Niewierski on one level conjure memories of childhood and stuffed animals. While there’s a bright, sculptural sensuality about them, their titles might refer to things less innocent if not repugnant, like accidental spillages or road kill. “I-77(North)” is a zippered fabric bag, eerily embryonic with little human fingers poking through the zipper. “I-77 (South)” is a furry deer carcass neatly sliced in two to reveal gaily patterned guts splayed on a patch of orangish “blood.”

More raw still are the pieces by Susan McClelland, who works with gut, sisal rope, and latex in producing visceral “systems” of materials that have been sewn together. Most of these works have the look of reconstituted natural detritus and otherwise organic growths, and are compelling in how they suggest processes of things damaged, then repaired and healed. The persistence of life after trauma.

A connection to nature is clearly evident, too, in the captivating small objects by Kate Budd. Her wax forms, looking like various types of pods and seeds, have been cut and buffed just so, then adorned with pins or tiny glass beads. Decorating the already decorous. Not that the wondrous shapes and textures found in nature cry out for any artificial embellishments on our part. But altering these forms in this manner becomes, on one level, a truly fascinating commentary on the human tendency to not leave well-enough alone or (best intentions notwithstanding) to augment what doesn’t need to be augmented.

The three impeccably crafted works by Isabel Farnsworth seem to be at once whimsically abstract and seriously thoughtful codes for private, emotional experiences. “The Sea Inside” sits very low on the floor - a table of sorts. The top is a resin-encased wooden cut-out of a supine figure completely covered with a blue pattern of ocean waves. Supporting this surface underneath is an arrangement of equal-sized compartments, each housing a huddled figure. Quietly somber. An elegy?

Resonating throughout many of the works in this collection is the sense that the artists have processed privately important objects or events – some pleasant and some uncomfortable - and fashioned them into deeply personal symbols. For Clare Murray Adams, those memories are rooted in domestic family life and a rural, womanly ethos. Her mastery of the encaustic medium (pigments suspended in beeswax) serves her well. Its variable transparency gives her assemblages of ghostly surface patterns along with objects on, or recessed into the picture plane - such as balls of yarn, fabric swatches, and spindles - a timeless, sometimes mysterious heirloom quality without turning them into merely saccharine mementos.

And like the other whatsits here, they’re wonderfully engaging material witnesses to intimate realities.

Photo: “I-77 (South)” by Kortney Niewierski, on view in the Main Hall Gallery at Kent State University Stark, THROUGH OCTOBER 28. Gallery hours are Mon. – Fri. 11am to 5pm / Saturday 10am to Noon.

A Species of Writing

2011-10-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

A Species of Writing
By Tom Wachunas

“All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.” –Charles Baudelaire-

“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” –Keith Haring-

Edgar Degas once defined drawing as “…the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing.” Drawing as language? If we think of writing as a way of processing and externalizing internal ideas via mark-making, we can reasonably apply Degas’ definition in appreciating a broad spectrum of visual drawing styles. And it is indeed a broad spectrum of media and styles that we see in a delightful exhibit, called “Pencil Me In,” at The Canton Museum of Art. The show runs concurrently with “A Nation Divided,” and features 51 drawings from the museum’s permanent collection, spanning the 19th to the 21st century.

Just as writing is a manipulation, or configuration of symbols that collectively express either abstractions (thoughts, ideas, feelings) or concrete representations of physical realities, so also two-dimensional drawing. Good drawing is certainly not limited to reproducing super-realistic, faithful-to-nature replicas of a subject.

But when an artist does accomplish masterfully complete illusions of reality, the effect is invariably wowing, and there are some stunning examples of that here. Among those are three elegant nude studies – masterpieces of soft precision in pencil – by John Hemming Fry, and the spectacular, lavish colored pencil and acrylic “Still Life with Silver Bowl and White Cup” by Jeanette Pasin Sloan. And then there's Lowell Tolstedt's astounding tromp l'oeil colored pencil "Great American Still Life..." An artichoke, green apple, and apricot sit atop a square of crinkled foil, and their reflected colors make for a shimmering gem of pure abstraction.

Of course the discipline of drawing can be a prelude to a project in another medium. No doubt the French Realist Jean Millet practiced the lofty tradition of making many charcoal sketches in preparation for his iconic paintings of the rural working class. There are three here – two loose and fluid studies of field workers, and the more charmingly refined, pastoral “Shepherdesses.” And for all of the sketchy airiness in Charles Burchfield’s “Cicada Spirit,” executed with child-like simplicity, the small drawing exudes a largely magical, meditative energy. Similarly, there’s an eerie magic and spontaneity at work in Will Barnet’s dramatic charcoal “Emily Dickenson.” The stark figure of a woman standing on a low, barren knoll, her back to us, is made all the more haunting and lonely by a massive sky filled not with clouds, but swarming blackbirds. Like many of the drawings in this show, it may or may not have been a preparatory study for a painting, yet it is a complete – and compelling – entity unto itself.

Speaking of compelling entities, perhaps the most remarkable offering here is “Impressions: Europe #26,” a conte crayon and ink work by George Kozmon, Jr. This architectural rendering is a powerful orchestration of tonalities both deeply saturated and subtly variegated, along with intricate, rhythmic linear design and rich textures. The drawing transforms a classically- styled building - presented from a refreshingly inventive perspective - into a fascinating homage to abstract pictorial structure.

And like all great drawings of things seen in “reality,” it rewrites the familiar into something very new and surprising.

Photo, courtesy cantonart.org, “Impressions: Europe #26,” conte crayon and ink on paper, by George Kozmon, Jr., on view through October 30 at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Ave. N., Canton. (330) 453 – 7666.

Then Sings My Soul

2011-09-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Then Sings My Soul
By Tom Wachunas

“The world will never starve for wonder, but only for want of wonder.” –G.K.Chesterton-

“Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

There have been moments in my life when I felt - standing with wordless wonder in the presence of mountains, or feeling my face gently slapped by wind-blown ocean water, or walking beneath the verdant, sun-dappled canopy of a towering pine forest – that I was actually in the mind of God. I’m fairly convinced we’ve all had such encounters at least one time or another – or should. I feel blessed to have had many.

Another blessing has been taking vicarious pleasure in Nature via the art of well-traveled photographers who seek out the pristine, transcendent grandeur of our physical planet. And so it is that in that same vein I feel blessed yet again to have seen the current exhibition of photographs by Portland, Oregon photographer Rick Canham, on view in both the Student Center and the Advanced Technology Center at Stark State College. His show is called “Brief Moments in Light,” and it is indeed, in a word, wondrous.

This magnificent collection of images demonstrates Canham’s 30 years of experience in purely seeing and framing the sheer power, vitality, and palpable grace of his subjects. Aside from his meticulous attention to color balance and print density, he doesn’t employ any digital trickery. Instead, he brings a painterly intuition to just the right time and place - drawing, so to speak, with light, texture, and sumptuous color. For Canham, this combination of disciplined eye, technical prowess (he does all his own color darkroom printing), and fortuitous timing has produced invariably breathtaking declarations of his clear reverence for, and awe of, earth, water, and sky.

It’s important to remember that photographers, like painters, make aesthetic decisions – they choose what formal elements will occupy the picture plane. In that, Canham is a consummately thoughtful organizer of the picture plane. He can beguile us with abstract, even minimalist essences, as in the haunting and simple “The Vivid Edges of a World,” wherein the soft alpen glow of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico seems indeed otherworldly. Many other scenes are more muscular, even heroic in their composition - spectacular blendings of intricate, sharp textures of earth and foliage against larger, strongly defined rock forms, as in the majestic arched symmetry of “A Moment When Something Sacred Is Revealed,” from Utah’s Zion National Park. His close-ups of undulating sandstone formations in the Colorado Plateau are utterly hypnotic. Still others are more poetic, impressionistic panoramas, both serene and churning, immersed in fog or sun-drenched ocean mists, as in the golden “The Great Sea Stirs Me,” where the crests of violent waves glimmer as if sprinkled with tiny jewels.

Our history is rich with philosophers and artists who have wisely said, in various ways, that Nature is God’s art. As I’ve mentioned several times in the past, I think that when we humans make our own art (and in particular, re-presenting Nature), we are, consciously or not, noticing the remnant spark of God’s primordial act of love – his creation – thus receiving it with joy. More important, one need not be an artist to be touched by Nature’s intrinsic power to elicit wonderment. In lieu of witnessing first- hand the myriad geographic gems that crown this planet, artistic masterworks that commemorate them can go far in keeping us connected to genuine awe.

This show is bursting with such works. And while I’m not certain of Rick Canham’s specific religious leanings, I don’t really need to be. The titles of his pictures very often indicate that he senses a humbling spiritual ethos, and I suspect he has more than just an inkling that a higher power had a hand in making these scenes possible in the first place. He’s an eminently accomplished purveyor and editor of visions that are inspiring in their unspeakable beauty, and for that I’m deeply grateful. Beyond their technical and compositional excellence, his photographs do remind me that there is God, I’m not Him, and He’s available for intimate conversation when I behold the wonders of His art.

Photo: “A Moment When Something Sacred Is Revealed” – by Rick Canham, on view THROUGH NOVEMBER 12 at Stark State College Student Center and the Advanced Technology Center, 6200 Frank Avenue, North Canton. Public viewing hours are 8 am – 8 pm Monday to Thursday / 8 am – 4 pm Friday / 8 am – Noon Saturday. Information at (330) 494 – 6170, ext. 4319, or email rpriest@starkstate.edu

Psychedelia Redux, or Postmodern Doodling, or...?

2011-09-20T04:41:00.000-07:00

Psychedelia Redux, or Postmodern Doodling, or…?
By Tom Wachunas

The salon-style exhibit of several dozen untitled paintings by Joe Cortese, currently on view for maybe a few weeks at Acme Artists, poses something of a conundrum for anyone looking to pigeonhole exactly what he does as a painter. My suggestion is…don’t try. Better to take your cues from the show’s title – “Joe Cortese: The Life and Mind of…” – and be content to know that what Joe Cortese does best is…Joe Cortese.

There’s a lot of nodding going on here: nods to the Abstract Expressionists, including some Pollockian splatter jobs sans the gripping density; nods to Byzantine-type intricate patterning and bordering; nods to the ‘automatic writing’ of the Surrealists; nods to the urban graffiti milieu; nods to the underground comics of the 1970s; some nods to Peter Max (on steroids, maybe) psychedelia. If there is a dominant flavor in this mixed bag, Cortese himself calls it (in a September 16 Canton Repository story) “…a glorified doodle.” Or at least (when the paintings fall short of unarguably “glorious,” which many do) structured painterly scribbling.

And indeed, it’s the exploring of pictorial structures – regardless of what the paintings signify in overt content – that I find to be the most unifying element of this show. More specifically, structural dualities. Within the picture plane, Cortese often describes two “systems” of configurations (elaborate linear illustrations and amorphous color fields, for example) that can be either wholly separate, or integrated edge-to-edge - one system imposed upon, or in harmony with, another. If these works do signify the mind of the artist, it’s a mind that apparently loves, simultaneously, organized and elaborate decoration for its own sake, and surrender to serendipity; precise, intentional design and expressive spontaneity.

This tension, this clash and/or blending of motifs, has an emotional resonance (surely personal to Cortese, yet suggestive for us in one way or another) that is often quite intense, translated into a color dynamic that can be alternately cloying and inviting. We’re witnesses to the artist’s struggle to negotiate that tension into an agreement of some sort. Sometimes the resolution is awkward, left in suspended animation. And when there is a truce, many of Cortese’s intricate forms and surfaces, while often collaborating to produce dramatic spatial depth, and despite passages of saturated, neon-bright color, tend to radiate an aura of battle-induced ennui rather than any really ardent optimism.

In the end, amid the variously frenzied, brash, or sometimes silly pictorial content to be encountered in these works, I’m nonetheless left with the sense that there might be a latent or understated genius at work. The best paintings in this wild gestalt speak more compellingly about a process than about anything of discernable, accessible “reality,” and there’s certainly nothing intrinsically wrong with that. In any event, rest assured that for those of us who opt to peer deeply into that process, there’s little chance of, so to speak, nodding off.

Photo, courtesy Canton Repository Sept. 16 issue of ‘Ticket.’ Joe Cortese at Acme Artists, 332 Fourth Street NW, downtown Canton. (330) 452- 2263.

No Letdown Stand-Up

2011-09-17T07:45:00.001-07:00

No Letdown Stand-Up
By Tom Wachunas

“Comedy is exaggerated realism. It can be stretched to the almost ludicrous, but it must always be believable.” - Paul Lynde -

The raucous season-opening production of “3 Guys Naked from the Waist Down” at Akron’s Weathervane Playhouse is a veritable theatrical pastiche, deftly melding hilarious, bizarre satire with a story line that moves along at relentlessly rapid-fire pace. The show, originally created by Michael Rupert (music) and Jerry Colker (book and lyrics), ran for 160 off- Broadway performances in 1985 and won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical.

Don’t be too thrown by the title. Yes, there are three men – total - in the cast. But beyond their progressively exposed egos, aspirations, and disillusionments, they don’t in fact get naked. This is a PG-13 story (language and thematic content) about Ted Klausterman, Kenny Brewster, and Phil Kunin – a New York City trio of stand-up comics whose meteoric rise to international celebrity, and subsequent flame-out, is alternately hysterical, pathetic, and poignant.

Marc Moritz directed this show, and he’s clearly let his cast, both as singers and actors, bring an exhilarating spontaneity to their respectively distinct performing styles, which in turn gives riveting credibility to their characters. And rest assured, these are three startlingly wild and crazy guys.

Rob Dougherty presents a remarkably finessed combination of optimistic charm and self- confidence in his role of comedy club emcee Ted Klausterman, the trio’s resourceful ‘leader,’ fascinating to watch as he vacillates, with maddening ease, between his own wisdom and the ludicrous choices he makes in his hunger for success. As Phil Kunin, hefty Patrick Ciamacco is commandingly funny even if he is the quintessential “angry guy” – a possible sociopath in the making if not already ripe. His street-wise, scary volatility is all the more intriguing as we watch him struggle to balance an insane career with his genuine longing to be with his family – conveyed with aching tenderness as he sings “A Father Now” late in the second act.

And speaking of scary volatility fused with tenderness, there’s Kenny Brewster, played to the hilt by Connor Simpson. The character is described as a “Zen Catholic,” which only somewhat explains his “conceptual” comedy routine. Simpson is nothing short of mesmerizing as he negotiates his character’s surreal disconnects from life as we know it, slipping in and out of various movie roles with the alacrity of a quick-change artist, and an inventory of voices to match. If chronic psychotic episodes can be said to be gut-splittingly funny, Brewster/Simpson’s your man. But there’s a darker underside to this pathology, colored by a desire to leave it all behind one way or the other, as Simpson sings with convincing, childlike pining in “Dreams of Heaven.”

Keyboardist Brad Wyner directs a small but razor-sharp live ensemble here, delivering a fully rich, energetic sound that’s always in fine balance with the impeccably enunciated singing. Arguably, the musical doesn’t yield memorable, anthemic songs with truly iconic melodies. But they do possess an appropriate, in-the-moment verve and theatricality – infectiously so - that effectively enhances the slap-stick, cabaret atmosphere.

For all of the masterful lampooning and satire we see here about show business and “The American Dream,” the story never succumbs to heavy-handed moralizing. Think of it as a tornadic, we’re-all-Bozos-on-this-bus tour through a country named Stand-Up Comedy. The authors of the written constitution for this particular country were surely inspired by the likes of The Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Andy Kaufman. It’s a country where some laws of physics still hold true – the opposite of gravity is comedy; what goes up must come down; you’re not in Kansas anymore. Enjoy the ride.

Photo: from left to right, Connor Simpson as Kenny Brewster, Patrick Ciamacco as Phil Kunin, and Rob Dougherty as Ted Klausterman, in the Weathervane Playhouse production of “3 Guys Naked from the Waist Down.” Shows through September 25, 1301 Weathervane Lane, Akron. Performances are Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 2:30 pm. Tickets are $24, $21 for seniors and students for Thursday and Sunday performances, and $19.50 for children ages 17 and younger. For tickets, visit or call the box office at (330) 836 – 2626, or online at www.weathervaneplayhouse.com

Homeland Asunder

2011-09-14T16:57:00.001-07:00

Homeland Asunder
By Tom Wachunas

“This is not war, this is murder.” – a Confederate general after viewing Union dead from the Battle of Cold Harbor, 1864 –

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” – Robert E. Lee, after the Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862 –

Some anniversaries are cause for joyous remembrance. Others of course are occasions for somber reflection if not remorse. Amid all the media coverage of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there were several reports of how the awful debris from ground zero has made its way to far-flung places across this land. Corroded girders and all manner of twisted, burned architectural remnants have been exhibited as public monuments. Oh how we cherish the artifacts and remains of our cruelest tragedies. In as much as we regard such displays with solemn respect, I wonder if they’re not so many milestones along our trudge through history as much as they are millstones weighing down our relentlessly troubled heads and hearts.

To the extent that war itself has been disambiguated into an “art” (Sun Tzu’s 5th century BC treatise, “The Art of War,” comes to mind), then it’s certainly true that we’ve made an art out of remembering it. A breathtaking, lavish example is the current exhibition at The Canton Museum of Art, called “A Nation Divided: The Heartland Responds.” The sprawling show commemorates, with particular relevance to Ohio and surrounding ‘heartland’ states, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. In its sheer depth and variety of artifacts – clothing, weaponry, letters written from soldiers’ camps, and a stunning array of other 19th century wartime “accessories,” the exhibit is a curatorial tour de force.

But what sheds the most dramatic light on this dark episode of American history is the imagery – photographs, drawings, and prints that bring a palpable, heartrending immediacy to a terrible conflagration. Photography in the 1860’s was still considered by many to be a newfangled concoction, a novelty. The first permanent photographic images – daguerreotypes – were introduced in 1839. As a medium for presenting indisputable records of physical realities (prior to modern-age technical trickery), it’s fair to say that photography quickly came of age during the Civil War. And with it, the classical notion that war was in any way a noble or sanctified pursuit would flounder in a sea of images of the wounded, the dead, the savaged landscape.

This is certainly not to say that the predominant content of the imagery here is blood and gore. Far from it. In fact, emanating from many of the photographs of soldiers is a sense of quiet pride and dignity, even if there is the accompanying appearance of antiseptic stiffness. No such rigidity, though, is to be found in the marvelous drawings by Winslow Homer that were turned into prints for Harper’s Weekly. For all their aged, dingy patina, these are remarkably alive depictions of soldiers that exude real emotion and often, if it can be said of such a horrific context, compelling warmth.

The exhibit nonetheless succeeds in reminding us quite effectively of the more jarring and deadly complexion of battle. One display case presents us with photos of Alvah R. Williams, a Pennsylvania soldier wounded in the Battle of Petersburg. A photo shows him after surgery, his right arm amputated. Also on display is the .58 caliber bullet (“Minie Ball”) that shattered his elbow, as well as a leather prosthetic. It’s an eerily medieval contraption with internal metal gears, originally colored to look like flesh, and now just a sickly, mottled gray. Elsewhere, another case houses a battlefield surgeon’s tool box, containing amputation saws, knives, a tonsil puller, blood letter, and an utterly sinister-looking skull drill.

On the heels of commemorating 9/11 and all it conjures in our hearts, this exhibit is still timely in its powerful joining of art with history. Yet in all of its authentic lest-we-forget sensibility, and the thoroughly expert care with which it was assembled, there is perhaps a hint of bittersweet irony about it. I wish we didn’t need (or want) to see shows of this sort at all. But we do. In his own era, Robert E. Lee hoped we would not grow too fond of war. He’d surely be mortified to witness that now in the 21st century, war remains evidently not terrible enough to abandon. So I suppose you could say I “love” this exhibit. But I hate doing so.

Photo: “Home From The War,” by Winslow Homer, on view through October 10 at The Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton. Museum hours are Tuesday, Wednesday 10am to 8pm / Thursday, Friday 10am to 5pm / Saturday 10am to 3pm / Sunday 1 – 5pm.
www.cantonart.org (330) 453 - 7666

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

2011-09-11T10:38:00.001-07:00

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy
By Tom Wachunas

Who? Hairspray. A musical based on the 1988 film written and directed by John Waters, with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. A 2002-2009, multiple Tony Award winner on Broadway with a run of 2,500 packed shows. And a film remake in 2007.

The current live production playing on the mainstage of the Players Guild Theatre in Canton makes the 1988 film look like a wilted, miscast practice run.

Director Craig Joseph once again brings his Midas touch to the Guild proceedings, made all the more golden by Michael Lawrence Akers’ sharp, electrifying choreography and Steve Parsons’ masterful direction of a muscular, airtight 11-piece orchestra. Throw in a generous dose of inventive scenic design by Craig Betz, along with lavish, eye-popping costumes by Susie Smith with Cristine Patrick. Then add an astonishingly buoyant 34-member cast of unassailable talent that sings and dances with indefatigable energy, bolstered by the crisp, lush harmonies from a six-member vocal ensemble (singing offstage). Now you’ve got all the tasty ingredients for a show - already spiced up with sizzling-hot songs - that is nothing short of pure, undiluted brio incarnate.

The story is a Cinderella derivative of sorts, with a sociopolitical message. Set in 1962 Baltimore, it’s built around Tracy Turnblad, a vivacious, plump, white teen who dreams of romance, dancing on her favorite TV show, acceptance from her peers, and overcoming racial divide. From the inspiring, animated opening number, “Good Morning Baltimore,” to the second act’s Dionysian dance marathon in the climactic “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” there’s not a lackluster minute that goes by in this raucous collision between giddy 1960s pop schmaltz and genuine pathos.

And it all starts with the wide-eyed, disarming optimism and sheer lovability of Chelsea Boyd, who plays Tracy with palpable, lithe grace and savvy vocal effervescence. Tosca Rolf is absolutely endearing and daffy in her role of Tracy’s best friend, Penny. Equally loveable and funny is Adam J. Ford, who plays Edna, Tracy’s agoraphobic, very plus-sized mother. “I’m a simple housewife of indeterminate girth,” Edna/Ford purrs at one point, with convincing self-deprecation. Despite the sheer bulk of his fat suit, Ford carries his towering, infectiously comedic self with seemingly impossible delicacy and even a regal elegance. J. Scotland Gallo brings a vaudevillian charm and truly authentic affection for Edna to his portrayal of Wilbur, the Turnblad patriarch who owns the Hardy-Har Hut novelty shop. “My parents begged me to run away to the circus,” he glibly tells Tracy in support of her dreams. Ford and Gallo provide one of the evening’s most memorably tender (yet hilarious) passages as they sing “You’re Timeless To Me.”

Teresa Houston turns in a deliciously vampiric reading of her mean-spirited character, Velma Von Tussle, the bigoted producer of the wildly popular Corny Collins Show (a weekly teen dance-fest sponsored by Ultra Clutch Hairspray). Jay Oldaker seems born to the role of Corny Collins - yes, indeed a corny but likeable hybrid of Frankie Avalon and Dick Clark. Amanda Medley nails the manipulative, self-possessed and hurtful character of Velmas’s daughter, Amber, with real relish. Her would-be boyfriend, Link (who is ultimately won over by Tracy’s sincerity and passion), is a dapper young crooner played by Grant Cole, who captures his character’s narcissistic suavity - and his honest heart - with remarkable sensitivity. Kathy Boyd (no relation to Chelsea) plays Motormouth Maybelle, a mentoring ally in Tracy’s efforts to integrate The Corny Collins Show. With all the heated fervor of an impassioned gospel singer, she provides one of the evenings’s several show-stoppers with her inspired rendition of “I Know Where I’ve Been.”

Beyond the skillfully clear and soaring vocal performances, what keeps the production churning at an exhilarating pace is the dancing. That’s understandable enough, considering that this is, among other things, a show about a dancing show. And in that, the cast delivers with consistent, Motown-flavored panache.

With this opening show of its 80th Anniversary season, The Players Guild has surely raised the bar for (and perhaps redefined) professionalism in Canton-area community theatre. I’m fresh out of superlatives. This production is the real deal.

Photo by James Dreussi. HAIRSPRAY, at the Canton Players Guild Theatre, in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Ave. N, Canton. Shows, through October 2, at 8pm Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30pm Sundays. Tickets are $23 for adults, $18 ages 17 and younger. Available at www.playersguildtheatre.com or by calling (330) 453-7617.

Vibrato In Paint

2011-09-09T08:47:00.001-07:00

Vibrato in Paint
By Tom Wachunas

“He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency.”
- Henri Matisse, discussing Gustave Moreau’s mentorship and guiding philosophy on the expressive possibilities of color -

“Donatello au milieu des fauves!” Donatello among the wild beasts! That’s what critic Louis Vauxcelles declared the first time he saw paintings in 1905 by a group of like-minded artists (including, among many others, Matisse, Roualt, and Derain) who quickly became known as The Fauves – The Wild Beasts. As an “official” European movement, Fauvism lasted only several years, and was received with considerable public vitriol and critical antagonism. But its formal characteristics of vivid, strident colors juxtaposed with distilled, subtly abstracted shapes would exert far-reaching influences across both geography and time.

Nancy Stewart Matin is an accomplished beneficiary of that (to name just one) influence. Looking at the many watercolors in her current show at The Little Art Gallery, I felt immersed in a kind of synesthesia, as if hearing a commanding opera soloist – a nimble coloratura soprano whose vibrato is as audaciously earthbound as it is soaringly sweet. As a painter, she’s a self-described “abstract expressionist and a colorist.” True enough. But on her visit to this planet (her show is called “The Visitor”), she has also managed to absorb influences of Van Gogh, Picasso, and Matisse, along with spicy dashes of Surrealism, synthesizing all of it into a thoroughly electrifying, signature iconography.

That electricity – or roar, if you will – emanating from Matin’s adroit handling of what she calls “the fickle nature” of watercolor is most consistently the result of her bold, florid palette and its uncanny luminescence. Matin is anything but timid or complacent about bright color dynamics. Sometimes her compositions are tightly structured and contoured - as in the delightfully exotic “Coconut Bananas” or her humorous “Sunglasses,” with its subtly skewed passages of stripes fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Other compositions are relatively more spontaneous and abstract, as in the primordial, liquid intricacy of “Cave Dwellers.” Still others are imbued with an unmistakably lyrical charm, like “Three Maidens,” wherein flowers seem to suggest a fluid trio of dancers.

But it’s the colors, always those colors, that beckon and grip as if glowing from deep inside the picture plane. Nowhere here is that sensibility more apparent than in the dramatic “Zoar Sunset.” It’s a remarkably simple, balanced picture, compelling in its comparatively limited range of hues. Matin’s loosely drawn Zoar Inn (rendered in wispy black contour lines) is set against a predominantly orange-ish sky, “grained” by vertical streaks of darker colors. The surrounding ground is punctuated with radiant green plant life – a luminous chemistry that makes the entire composition seem to vibrate with an unseen fire’s hypnotic pulsing.

And whatever fire may be driving or guiding Matin’s life journey, this exhibition makes eminently clear that her virtuosic brush continues to sing wildly infectious, exuberant songs of celebration.

Photo: “Picasso Me,” watercolor by Nancy Stuart Matin, on view THROUGH OCTOBER 1 at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton. (330) 499 – 4712, extension 312.

Mournings After

2011-09-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

Mournings After
By Tom Wachunas

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” - Genesis 4: 10-13 –

“Like me, she was merely a bystander to the events, but they played a role in the coming of war to her country. I wonder how life changed for her and how she views the events surrounding that day.”
- Heather Bullach, from the statement for her portrait “Iraqi Girl” in the Anderson Creative exhibition, “The Persistence of Memory” -

From the beginning, we humans have demonstrated a ghastly propensity for hurting each other. All of our history is imprinted with unspeakable injustices and cruelties. In my lifetime thus far, none of those horrors is more towering, literally or symbolically, than 9/11. To the extent that scars from a tragedy of that enormity can take many forms, long and deep, I don’t believe that all our wounds will ever completely heal. I wasn’t alive, for example, during the Holocaust, but encountering its recorded history still chills me to the bone. In these matters, time, in and of itself, heals nothing. Nor should we expect it to. For we are beings that remember. And remembrance, when engaged in a spirit of honoring the sanctity of human life, is a salve most precious.

With the exhibition called “The Persistence of Memory,” Anderson Creative and guest curator Dr. Fredlee Votaw – who has himself made compelling artworks about human tragedies – have gathered a richly varied group of artists to remember 9/11. The group is comprised of adults who remember the day itself, 20 year-olds who were then children, and current fifth-graders from Lake Elementary who have processed the awful event as told/shown to them by others. The participating adults and 20-somethings are Michelle DeBellis, Diane Belfiglio, James B Studios, Heather Bullach, Sharon Charmley, Judith Christy, Scott Alan Evans, Annette Yoho Feltes, Barb Hoskins, Rick Huggett, Chris Triner, and myself (forever grateful to be included).

What makes this show easily among Anderson Creative’s most powerful to date goes well beyond its timely thematic unity (commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11) and its excellence of craft. Without ever succumbing to blustery, obtuse politicizing or philosophizing, the works collected here are seething with emotional accessibility and disarming sincerity.

Particularly heartrending is the group of 45 color drawings of faces on paper – “Portraits of the Departed” - by the Lake Elementary students. Most of the faces, with eerily hollow eyes, are bordered with text that reveals something of their lives – dreams of futures never realized.

Heather Bullach’s stunning oil portrait – “Iraqi Girl” – is a warm, wondrously generous reaching out to embrace the impact of 9/11 on an “alien” culture as inexorably caught up in its aftermath as our own. Faces abound, too, in Sharon Charmley’s oil and collage, “The Agony of Grief and Relief,” a scene depicting an attended wall of missing persons notices – ubiquitous New York City sites where anguish and joy comingled. One of the notices hangs loose off the surface, reading “Sometimes I still think I might see you and get a chance to say goodbye.”

“Temporary Tattoo” is a jarringly honest written testimony by Judith Christy. It tells of her emotional passing from an intense, extended state of social awareness and patriotic fervor immediately after 9/11, eventually into a settled if not sad “life goes on” mode of fighting complacency while looking to be impassioned again.

From the statement accompanying Diane Belfiglio’s crisp 2002 acrylic painting, “In Memoriam,” we are drawn to a bittersweet irony. The painting is of the William McKinley Mausoleum, its imposing stone facade sparkling in the bright sunlight, and rendered in a way hauntingly mindful of World Trade Center verticality. Belfiglio was working on this very painting just as her husband called with news of the plane attacks.

Even more bittersweet, Annette Yoho Feltes’ work, a mobile sculpture suggestive of wind chimes, called “Birds,” was inspired by a remembered National Public Radio interview. Therein a mother said that her daughter - who was on that morning in a daycare center very near the Towers - reported looking out the window and seeing many birds in the air. These of course were the bodies of falling people. Feltes’ 200 small, white porcelain bird forms hang in two groups – ‘towers’ - counterweighted by a larger form, a hovering black ‘plane’ a few feet away. Despite all the terrible images that the work might potentially bring to mind, it doesn’t so much signify to me a procession of descending bodies as it evokes an inspiring ascension of spirits.

It is indeed this same spirit of evocation that is present in most of the works here. Neither too morbid nor preachy, what prevails is a distinct sense of quiet mourning and solemn reverence. And for all of that, I think of this show as a potent, collective prayer.

Photo: “Iraqi Girl,” oil portrait by Heather Bullach (courtesy Craig Joseph, Anderson Creative). THE PERSISTENCE Of MEMORY at Anderson Creative, THROUGH OCTOBER 1, at 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery hours Wednesdays through Saturdays, Noon to 5pm. www.andersoncreativestudio.com

Empyreal Energies

2011-09-02T13:36:00.001-07:00

Empyreal Energies
By Tom Wachunas

“Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of wind.” – Maxwell Bodenheim –

“There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.” –Annie Dillard-

Even though Hurricane Irene’s recent reign over newsprint, TV, and cyberspace (not to mention the Eastern U.S. coastline) has been downgraded to last week’s news, I’m never too far from nature’s power to hold me in awe - even if indirectly, as in looking at art inspired by that power. Case in point: the current show of paintings by Nancy Seibert in the Main Hall gallery at the Kent State University Stark campus.

The show’s title – “Internal Powers” – is apropos not just because Seibert draws her pictorial inspiration from the atmospheric and earthy nuances of summer and autumn, but because the works are manifestations of the power of the artist’s intuition in generating her ethereal visions. Who can catch the wind indeed? These paintings, while suggesting seasonal light, color, and airy motion (without being literal illustrations), are also intriguing, visceral evidence of an ephemeral, abstract process.

Most of that evidence rises from variable paint viscosities and textures, combined with real sensitivity to gestural brush marks. Yet for all of the apparent hand manipulation of her materials, the resulting imagery looks more spontaneous than self-conscious, as if a passing gust of wind or an ocean wave deposited these configurations on to their surfaces. So Seibert’s technique has allowed her to frame essences, imbuing her surfaces with a sense of transient physicality. These are translations of immanent, changeable weather, and otherwise elegant impressions of both celestial and earthen flux.

Among the works on view is a series of five paintings - under the collective title “High Spirits” - executed on masonite- mounted paper. In a way they look like refined studies for larger projects. The amorphous imagery doesn’t bleed out to the picture plane edges as it does in her larger canvas pieces, and thus floats ambiguously in a tentative, liquid state.

But in the canvas works, there is a compelling sort of resolution and balance between liquid, gaseous, and solid states. Tactile trails of the brush movements combine, intertwine, or collide with larger passages of paint that’s been stained, blotted and layered into the picture plane, sometimes leaving little bits raw canvas still visible. The net visual effect, even with a palette as largely soft and pale as seen here (with just a few exceptions), is one of energetic motion emerging from subtly dramatic depths.

And in their studied contrasts of frenetic swells and swirlings with organized moments of visual quietude, there’s still an almost primordial serenity at work in each of the paintings. Loud silence, or silent noise? Like an ancient Zen garden.

Photo: “Effervescence” – mixed media and collage by Nancy Seibert, on view through September 23. Gallery at Main Hall, Kent State University Stark campus. Viewing hours are 11am to 5pm Monday to Friday, 10am to Noon on Saturday.

Rustbelt Ruminations

2011-08-29T07:55:00.001-07:00

Rustbelt Ruminations
By Tom Wachunas

“Art is the raw stuff which comes from aggressiveness by men who got that way fighting for survival.”
- sculptor David Smith –
“I have never felt and don’t feel now that art needs any justification outside of itself. One can only be suspicious of those artists and architects “who gotta serve somebody (Bob Dylan’s Jesus Christ capitalist theology).” - sculptor Richard Serra –

The kind of extreme industrial abstractions or Minimalism that most brutally sets my teeth on edge was best embodied by Richard Serra’a infamous “Tilted Arc” installation, originally placed in New York City’s Federal Plaza in 1981. The piece was an aggressive, incredibly ugly impediment to plaza foot traffic, and the furor it caused led to a protracted legal battle that climaxed with its removal in 1989. I was there, dumbfounded when the work – a menacing wall of rolled steel 120’ long and 12’ high - first appeared. And I walked through the plaza – elated - on morning after it had disappeared in the wee hours of the night. I never regarded the decision to remove it as a censorship issue. It was more a judicious re-assessment of its philosophical and aesthetic hubris. You can see a picture of the work, along with some additional commentary, archived here in my post of October 20, 2009.

Modernism in the second half of the 20th century gave us plenty of other examples of Minimalist sculpture at its most “pure” by artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Tony Smith, to name only some. In most of those cases the works’ raison d’etre was clearly a deliberate eschewing of emotional content. Forms, often made of industrial materials, were severely reduced to geometric simplicities in an attempt to redefine “the art experience.” The resulting new experience was a radical shift in our traditional sense of art’s contexts, roles, and meanings. These objects were intended to simply “be” on their own terms, divested of any necessary capacity to conjure, suggest, or declare anything but…themselves.

Still, I never believed that Minimalism’s intended down-playing (if not outright elimination) of emotional relationship with - or interpretation of - the art object could ever be completely accomplished. Even when encountering Minimalism at its most intrusive or interruptive, as humans we’re emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually wired to seek out meaning and purpose to our art, no matter what it’s made of or what it looks like. OK fine, so call me a Romantic.

Currently in the first floor gallery of the Fine Arts building at Kent State University Stark campus is a show by sculptor Terry Klausman called “Steel: A Welded Sculpture Exhibition.” He’s not a trained artist in the traditional academic or formal sense, so in some ways you might regard his pieces as “outsider art.” No matter, really. As demonstrated here, his workmanship is clear and crisp, and his eye for fusing elegant lines, textures, and intriguing forms is very well-practiced and refined. In his statement he writes that he’s been influenced by Minimalism. But beyond his presenting us with unadorned, cut-and-welded steel shapes of considerable weight, his is a “humanized” Minimalism, infused with – dare I say it? – real personality.

From the largest of his monolithic Vertical Series pieces, to the smaller, more intricate “IS-11” series, variously suggestive of gear boxes or mechanical “guts,” there’s a human-scale intimacy and that belies their metallic, machine shop patina. Is this a collective homage to the steel industry that once ringed this part of the country like a bold and shiny necklace around Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Canton? A love song, or a swansong? In any case, these works aren’t so many mute sentinels of a bygone era as they are impeccably crafted recitations of sculpted rustbelt poetry. A passionate declaration of human hand united with industrial machine. And in as much as they might be reflections on past or waning livelihoods, they speak now with remarkable liveliness.

Photo: “IS-11-10” by Terry Klausman, ON VIEW THROUGH SEPTEMBER 15 in the Fine Arts building first-floor gallery at Kent State University Stark campus, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, Canton. Viewing hours are Monday – Thursday 8am to 8pm, Friday 8am to 5pm.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

2011-08-24T07:29:00.001-07:00

Reasons To Be Cheerful
By Tom Wachunas

Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.
- 2 CORINTHIANS 9: 6 – 8 -

First, I offer my sincerest Thank You to fellow artist and blogger Judi Krew for her recent post (Tuesday, August 23 at www.snarkyart.blogspot.com), reminding us about the August 25 (tomorrow!!) benefit soiree for Brennis Booth, to be held at the Cultural Center for the Arts. Read it. Right now, please. I’ll wait.

OK, you back? Second, I offer another Thank You to Dan Kane for his Repository article in the Ticket section (Friday, August 19) on the event. Read it. Right now, please. It’s on line at http://www.cantonrep.com/entertainment/x1852624512/Friends-rally-to-support-downtown-gallery-owner.

Still with me? Kane’s article acknowledged an earlier SnarkyArt post wherein Krew wrote, “Brennis and Todd are amazing people who truly have no idea just how big a footprint they have within our local community.” That loving assessment, it would seem now – judging from the astonishing volunteerism and support generated by The Brennis Bunch – is an indisputable fact of Canton’s cultural profile. You simply can’t grasp the realities of ‘the arts district’ without embracing Second April Galerie - its history, its community spirit, its continuing impact.

Did I just say “astonishing” volunteerism and support? Let me retract. I’m not astonished in the least. Gratified and overjoyed, yes, because God said there’d be days like this. He delivered. For I’m convinced that the successful outcome of Brennis’s surgery, and the outpouring of help in his time of physical healing and financial indebtedness, is first and foremost the result of God’s hearing many prayers – Brennis and Todd’s included. And in hearing those prayers, God uses servant hearts – even as they may not consciously know they are Divine instruments - to accomplish His ends.

So my last but biggest Thank You is to God and how He moves in this needy world. And included in that is my gratitude for the generosity and sensitivity of all those who stepped up to organize and contribute time, goods, and services to the August 25 fundraiser. The Brennis Bunch – what I called back on June 22 “Second April’s Effluent Spiral of Friends.” You are the manifest hand of Providence.

It’s His story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Photo, courtesy The Repository: Brennis Booth (left) and Todd Walburn, co-owners of Second April Galerie.

Reading the Righting on the Wall

2011-08-19T09:14:00.001-07:00

Reading the Righting on the Wall
By Tom Wachunas

These days I keep wondering when or if we’ll ever see some real football action in our arts district – as in public art works about professional football. This is not necessarily to say I pine for the day. In any case, local media seems to have been largely silent on the subject since Robb Hankins, president and CEO of ArtsinStark, proposed back in 2009 “jaw-dropping” football-themed art works to adorn downtown Canton. So I wait with bated and baited breath.

Meanwhile, there is for our edification yet a new downtown mural by BZTAT – Vicki Boatright – that has been recently installed on the south-facing brick wall of the Imperial Room at 420 Court Avenue NW. While the mural isn’t a ‘jaw-dropping’ example of sheer physical monumentality, or dramatic trompe l’oeil sensationalism, there is a clearly head-and-heart-raising message behind this warm image of a smiling child flanked by a dog and cat. Boatright’s well-known passion for rescuing and caring for domestic pets is still vibrantly apparent, but here she draws deeper attention to the human element.

Called “Safe Animals Safe Kids,” the 12’ x 8’ painting is part of Boatright’s ongoing “Okey’s Promise: Art for a Cause” project, named for a rescued cat. As indicated on the panel below the painting, the artist wants to awaken our consciousness to the link between mistreatment of animals and child/domestic abuse. Her formal aesthetic remains consistent with past work, giving her contemporary pop compositions a decidedly commercial pizazz that looks part photo-shop manipulation, part paint-by-number segmenting. Add to that the neon-bright character of her palette, and the net effect is one of electric optimism.

While the idea that abused pets can bring to mind real and jarring scenarios of domestic violence, Boatright has wisely eschewed painting a mawkish visual narrative of darker realities for large-scale public viewing, presenting instead an uplifting symbol of hope to right a pervasive societal wrong. And in the ethos of public art, there is certainly a place for works that are positive calls to be aware of - and pro-active in - addressing social ills.

Beyond that, and with great respect for BZTAT’s commendable vision - her new mural brings me back to wondering about the state of public art works as it stands now in downtown Canton. This particular piece is her third in a two-block area. A small handful of other local artists’ larger works similarly dot the downtown landscape. Over-saturation? Time will tell. I’m simply hoping that our concept of public installations by local artists doesn’t become so insular as to suggest that the arts district – which should benefit the many (artists and public alike) - doesn’t become too personal a creative playground for the few.

For information about BZTAT’s work, and OKEY’S PROMISE, visit her web sites at www.bztat.com
and www.okeyspromise.com Photo courtesy BZTAT.

When Worlds Collide

2011-08-13T12:01:00.000-07:00

When Worlds Collide
By Tom Wachunas

“A Walking Shadow” - the newest play by Sherry Yanow and Deborah Fezelle that premiered August 12 at the Kathleen Howland Theatre – is a serpentine journey through relentless political ambition and conspiratorial intrigue that is somewhat slow in uncoiling. But when it does uncoil, it’s against the steadily swelling backdrop of murder along with a few loudly rattled skeletons falling out of closets long locked up.

The story, directed by Deborah Fezelle, takes place in modern-day Washington, D.C., set in the congressional office of Representative Ethan Masters, and in the library of his Georgetown home. Young Ethan is an impulsive idealist butting heads with his godfather - ‘Lion of the Senate’ Gilbert Stanton - over an upcoming vote on a controversial environmental issue. Stanton plans to be the next U.S. President, and has been grooming Ethan to be his running mate, in accordance with the wishes of Ethan’s recently deceased father, the powerful newspaper magnate, E.J. Masters. Stanton prevails upon Ethan’s chief of staff, long-time friend Georgia Dean (and former employee of E.J. Masters), to convince Ethan to fall in line and quit rocking the boat, else ruin his political future. Beyond struggling to deal with the death of his iconic father, other pressures on Ethan include the investigation of the murder of his estranged wife, a psychic probing his past, scandal and blackmail brewing around an alleged extramarital affair, and a crazed lobbyist hungry for more love after a drunken one-night stand. Throw in being stalked by an equally crazed tree-hugger, and it’s no surprise that Ethan quickly makes friends with the bottle.

While the play certainly isn’t a comedy, it is well punctuated with some notably hilarious interludes, provided by Kristy Shank and Rufus Malone, Jr. Shank is a fireball in her viciously over- the- top role of Mariah, the sex-starved lobbyist. And as the loony, rubber knife-wielding Herbert, who talks to an unseen forest critter he carries in a tote bag, Malone is a comedic marvel.

Ariel Roberts plays Hayden Storm, the forensic psychic who shows up unexpectedly and unwanted at first, but proves to be cathartic in the end, affirming Ethan’s idealism. Roberts is thoroughly fascinating to watch as she unravels the twisted secrets surrounding Ethan – “shadows trailing shadows,” she calls them - all the while seeming to struggle with the fine line between her human intuition and her gift. As Ethan, Joseph M. Haladey, III is fascinating, too. In his character’s passionate fight to be perceived as genuinely “sympathetic” amid all his flaws, Haladey’s performance is in fact the play’s most accessible and poignant one. And he plays a really fine drunk in the process.

More complicated are Marilyn Wells as Georgia, and Ross Rhodes as Senator Stanton. Both can be riveting – even astonishing at times - in their respective portrayals of two driven people, each with a terrible secret and each obsessed with their cosmetic support of Ethan. Their tragic characters are made for each other, actually. But they often speak, both to each other and to Ethan, with an over-played gravitas that’s more wearying than natural. The dialogue itself is sufficiently loaded with crackling energy, but their delivery imbues it with a kind of mock- Shakespearean dignity that needlessly slows down the proceedings.

The net effect that’s projected from these complex performances is that the characters tend to come off a bit like stilted cartoons – very adult cartoons, I’ll grant. Ironically enough, though, that’s not to the play’s detriment as much as one might imagine it to be. Were I a first-time visitor to this planet, encountering these people and their dreadful machinations, I would likely regard them as parodies, and ask them for directions to the nearest real people. Ahh, but we earth folk know all too well, especially now, that politicians seem to have evolved into (with apologies to Macbeth) a sorry lot indeed - exasperating idiots of the first order, full of furious sound bytes, signifying nothing.

But this play does signify something. More than merely imitating life, genuinely engaging theatre – which this is, despite some pacing problems – intensifies and illuminates it.

Photo, courtesy Deborah Fezelle,“A Walking Shadow” cast, left to right: Marilyn Wells, Rufus Malone, Jr., Joseph M Haladey III, Ariel Roberts, Ross Rhodes – shows August 13, 19, 20 at 8p.m. in the Kathleen Howland Theatre, located in the lower level of Second April Galerie, 324 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Tickets $10, call (330) 451 – 0924. Visit www.topofthetownshows.com

From the Fringes, Dignity

2011-08-12T09:29:00.001-07:00

From the Fringes, Dignity
By Tom Wachunas

“A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound?”
- Charles Baudelaire –

“The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.” –Cindy Sherman-

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange –

Dorothea Lange is the luminary photographer who gave us “Migrant Mother, Nipomo Valley” in 1936 - one of the most poignantly searing photographs ever made of people living on the edge. Her statement quoted above resonates well with the theme and arresting images in the current exhibit of photographs by Jon Conklin, called “From The Margins,” at The Saxton Gallery in downtown Canton.

The quote also put me to wondering when we might have first introduced “taking a picture” into our vocabulary in reference to using a camera. There are many stories about how some “primitive” cultures saw the camera as a magical if not loathsome device that could rob a man of his spirit. “Taking a picture” was tantamount to a theft, or an assault. Of course civilized, enlightened folks attribute such perceptions to ignorance and superstition. Still, isn’t it ironic how we enlightened ones so easily measure great portraiture in terms of the photographer’s ability to “capture” the essence or soul of the subject at hand? Say what you will about clichés in describing creative processes, the simple fact remains that genuinely masterful photographers are genuinely masterful thieves. They steal moments from time before they forever slip away. Photography is indeed the magical, ephemeral pursuit of capturing essences.

Much of the imagery in Conklin’s collection here, spanning some 30 years, presents a slice of humanity existing in the often neglected, disenfranchised, and shadowy recesses of American society. The show is in some ways a bittersweet fanfare, a sonorous bell, tolling for lives lived in quiet desperation. In other ways it is a window on hope and resilience. Even at their most melancholic or brooding, interwoven with the loneliness and gritty mortality that we read in many of his portraits and scenes, is a compelling sense of real if not fragile dignity.

“Halloween Day, 1984” shows three scruffy boys - one with a girl mounted atop his shoulders, and two with smudged-on ‘masks’ of black makeup - standing around the rickety porch of a dilapidated house. Mounted on the wood siding behind them is a flimsy five-point star made of holiday string lights - an eerie counterpoint to all the peeling paint. Like several other black-and-whites here, the picture emanates a mystique gently reminiscent of bizarre scenarios by Diane Arbus. “Muddy Boy With Cord” haunts, too. Holding a frayed bungee cord, the gangly lad looks for all the world like a young, contemplative Robert Mitchum. Is this the wistful gaze of a boy who has seen far too much for his years, or is he dreaming of better days to come?

“A Visit With Mom” poses similarly intriguing questions. It’s a marvelously complex color shot of an interior. A woman stands at the doorway of a bedroom, oriented toward OUR space, but her focus is clearly on a serious conversation with the elderly woman we see reflected in the dresser mirror. The dresser top is adorned with framed family photos. The arm postures of the women, along with their concentrated facial expressions, echo each other in this playful but tense scene of frames within frames, lives within lives.

Another kind of complexity is at work in Conklin’s color images from that eye-popping, surreal mecca of stratified humanity, the Coney Island Boardwalk. Here is the photographer not so much as thief, but as hunter. He literally shoots from the hip, with camera on auto-focus, to give us delightfully tilted, rich perspectives, as in the man and woman walking with a baby stroller in “Saturday Afternoon.” The paunchy, bare-chested man sports flesh lavishly decorated with freakish tattoos, their wild colors strangely echoed by the psychedelic patterns in his mate’s blouse.

One photo that embodies the spirit of this show particularly well is the black-and-white “Oscar Studer, Talking Hands.” The triptych portrays a seated old man, leaning forward with steady, loving gaze into the lens, his hands larger than life as they sign… a giving. As if to say, “Here, have my story.”

Rather than just “taking pictures,” Conklin demonstrates an uncanny ability to recognize and somehow encourage his subjects’ authentic surrender to the moment, even as they know they’re being photographed. In giving us those moments – moving, evocative, quieting - Conklin is a remarkably generous artist.

Photo, courtesy Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography: “Muddy Boy With Cord,” by Jon Conklin, ON VIEW THROUGH OCTOBER 1 at 520 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery hours are Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday – Saturday. www.JosephSaxton.com

Iconiquins

2011-08-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

Iconiquins
By Tom Wachunas

“No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.” –Milan Kundera-

“I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” – Andy Warhol –

“We need to think seriously about how exactly we treasure and remember our heroes through our art. Are we loving the look, the feel, or the fame of our icons too much more than we love what they symbolize?” –June Godwit –

Among the most striking aspects of current show at Anderson Creative – called “Mann-Icons” - are its intimate uniformity of scale, and its straightforward concept. Anderson staffer Heather Bullach, in this her first project as a curator, gave each of her artists a wooden drawing mannequin and a shelf, and asked them to transform the figures into icons of their choosing, leaving the interpretation of ‘icon’ up to the artists. They were also required to create a 2-D background for their pieces. The resulting 13 works are, for the most part, delightfully entertaining 3D tableaus – presented like knick-knack or curio shelves – dedicated to figures from both fiction (literature and film) and real human history.

Given the ideological content, it’s not too surprising that a kitsch aesthetic is fairly prevalent. Some of the works look like they could be mockups for Lord and Taylor, or Macy’s window displays. While a few entries possess a slap-dash, throw-away carelessness, most are very solidly composed, constructed with impeccable craftsmanship and clear thoughtfulness if not unabashed affection for their subjects. Kitsch need not be so terribly cheap or vapid that it’s inconsequential junk. And rather than sparing us the strain of real contemplation - the hallmark of purely “low brow” art, or kitsch at its shallowest – the best pieces in this collection are pleasurable invitations to engage their subjects both cerebrally and emotionally, depending upon your predisposition to the “celebrities” being presented.

Sourcing cinema comedy, Kevin Anderson has cleverly reconstructed a scene, with his unadorned mannequin as Gene Wilder from “Blazing Saddles” (an iconic Western spoof if ever there was one), in his piece called “Yeah, But I Shoot With THIS Hand.” The mannequin’s hand is mechanically rigged to move up and down when viewers slide a toy pistol along a metal track. Interactive, kinetic art with hilarious results. Also from the world of film is Erin Mulligan’s “Mary Poppins,” with the mannequin elaborately made up into a likeness of Julie Andrews in her long black coat, holding her umbrella aloft as she glides through the air above London, shown via a luscious aerial-perspective backdrop painting in misty, liquid grays and tans. Luscious too is Chris Rood’s “Alice in Wonderland,” with its rich, meticulous sculptural detail and spectacular color. It’s a phantasmagorical menagerie that pays giddy homage to the Mad Hatter with Disneyesque panache.

David McDowell’s “William Shakespeare: Wordsmith” is a tour-de-force of unified form and function, content and concept. The mannequin is posed to conjure the famous soliloquy from Hamlet, with one knee on the bare shelf – the stage – and one hand holding a skull. Rising up next to the figure is a towering abstract ‘sculpture’ made from interlocking black plastic letters. A small spot lamp clipped to a corner of the stage shines up through the configuration, casting a shadow up on the wall in the startling likeness of The Bard. Dramatic and utterly ingenious.

For poignant, simple formal elegance, there’s Bob Yost’s “Jesus Christ.” The bare mannequin is crucified, the wood cross embedded in a mosaic of textured and glazed tiles, many carved with timeless, compelling words describing who Jesus is, what he did, and why. The piece embodies the more ancient connotations of “icons” – sacred likenesses. As such, the work effectively reminds me that this particular “historic” individual transcends modern manifestations of fame and celebrity. And in that, it’s the icon of all icons.

Photo by Heather Bullach, of the piece by David McDowell, “William Shakespeare: Wordsmith” on view at Anderson Creative, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday 12 noon to 5 p.m. www.andersoncreativestudio.com

Vital Signs

2011-08-05T14:17:00.001-07:00

Vital Signs
By Tom Wachunas

Over the last several years I’ve had lots to say about the state of public art works in our fair town. It’s no secret that I’ve waxed both hot and cold as to the unevenly- mixed (in content, craftsmanship, and purpose) group of downtown “monuments” to local creativity. All told, downtown Canton’s public art ethos is itself still very much a work in progress. I care about it so much because the re-vitalization of downtown Canton has so often been equated (and understandably so) with the much-touted ‘renaissance’ of artistic presence. Along with that is the concern about the qualities of the congratulatory face – civic, social, aesthetic - we present not just to ourselves in the arts community, but to our local citizenry AND out-of-town visitors.

Let’s remember that public art is not intended solely for heavily trafficked commerce areas or locales regularly designated for large public gatherings. The operative term here is, after all, ‘public’ – something visible and accessible for unrestricted viewing by ‘the people’ at large, be they shopping in a mall, walking past City Hall, or passing through (and living in) an off-the-beaten-path neighborhood.

Case in point: The recently completed Great Wall of Summit mural project. Measuring 150’ x 7’, the painting, designed by artist Michele Waalkes, is on a concrete wall that runs along a sidewalk at the NE corner of 10th Street NW and Fulton Road NW, very near the Arts Academy at Summit School. As acknowledged in Waalkes’ blog (www.michelewaalkes.blogspot.com), the project was done in collaboration with Community Building Partnership (CBP), with contributions from JP Morgan Chase Foundation and ArtsinStark. Neighborhood residents, along with CBP board members, City Council members, and ArtsinStark representatives, helped with the actual painting.

With child-like simplicity, crisp linearity, and vivid colors, Waalkes’ design is an inspired and inspiring testament to urban transformation. The painting tells a story of sorts that reads from left to right, and in the process celebrates a community embracing the arts. On the far left is a grid pattern – a map of neighborhood streets that morphs into angled and upright lines which in turn become houses, then animated stick figures that emerge dancing, playing music, making paintings, taking pictures, filling the air with outward-moving waves of energy. The choice to place these rainbow-colored configurations on a black ground is in itself a telling one, it seems to me – a symbolic beacon of tangible relief from the dark sameness of neighborhoods spotted with lifeless, abandoned homes.

This vivacious, thoughtful public work is a stunning witness to the power of the arts to unite people right where they live, in a spirit of affirmation and hope. Speaking of which, we can smile and hope that those colored waves of artful energy, emanating from the last figure on the right, will travel far beyond the confines of neighborhood.

Photo by Michele Waalkes. www.michelewaalkes.blogspot.com

ATMOSCAPES

2011-07-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

ATMOSCAPES
By Tom Wachunas

Those of you of a mind to cruise the archives herein might wish to re-visit my March 30 post of this year. There, I wrote about an exhibit at Second April Galerie of paintings by the late David Grant Roth. That show was appealing to me on several levels. Ever since seeing it, I’ve wanted to show his exquisite work at Gallery 6000, the space I curate on the Kent Stark campus. In fact, Roth’s work had resonated in my memory with such persistence that they inspired the theme of “Atmoscapes,” the new Gallery 6000 show that opens Tuesday, August 2. So here’s a special thank-you to Brennis Booth of Second April for his allowing me to borrow five Roth works that have been in his care.

With their gentle swells of thin, amorphous pools and clouds of luminescent hues, Roth’s color-field abstracts are conceptually simple, easy on the eyes, retreats for the soul, and places to reflect on - if not be fully immersed in - serenity. And it’s that notion of ‘spiritual place’ that I wanted to embrace with this show - places familiar as well as strange and mysterious, without being too unwelcoming. The works by the other participating artists – Lynn Digby, Carol McGill, Michele Waalkes, and Michael Weiss – bring a rich spectrum of complementary and compelling visions to this gallery journey.

Lynn Digby is a deliciously versatile painter. The brush work in her representational oil works here is laid in with an impressively fluid confidence, effectively embodying nature’s luscious physicality along with its atmospheric subtleties. “Sanctuary” is an impressionistic work stunning not just for its dynamically structured composition, but also in its marvelous concentration of light on the central boulder and sylvan pool of crisp, sparkling water.

Carol McGill’s acrylic canvases are less overtly representational than Digby’s. For all of their up-front color intensity and saturation, they have a distinctly ethereal presence. Her distant, expansive “skies” and horizons are gently punctuated with vaguely-defined masses both liquid and earthy. Amid the dominant, hot reds and analogous fiery hues (layered planes of color looking more rubbed or stained into the canvas than brushed on), McGill deftly introduces subtly blended transitions into cooler-colored edges or larger passages, bringing a fascinating tension to her distillations of hauntingly beautiful panoramas.

In Michele Waalkes’ elegant photo transfers of natural scenery on to sheer fabrics (which includes the occasional sewing of fiber elements directly on to the picture), the resultant images transcend the confines of pure photography. These are intimate, playful, and contemplative manipulations of the picture plane that, rather than shrouding or corrupting the images, give them a surprising, magical depth.

A magical intimacy is also at work in the digital pieces by Michael Weiss. But his intriguing photoshop prestidigitations have a decidedly painterly sensibility. With their ingenious patina of scratches and smoky, vintage colors, they look like they could be photographs of aged canvases depicting a mysterious and topsy-turvy world. There’s a Rene Magritte - meets - Harry Potter air in pieces such as “The Boat” and “Dropping Books Instead of Bombs.” In its eerie symbolism and dream-like scenarios, Weiss’s digital wizardry masterfully draws on a Surrealist tradition. And like all the works in this show, his are solidly poetic and evocative.

ATMOSCAPES opens at Gallery 6000, located in the University Center at Kent Stark, with a reception for the artists on Tuesday August 2 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Please RSVP to Becky DeHart at (330) 244-3518 or rdehart@kent.edu.

Photo: “Dropping Books Instead of Bombs” digital image by Michael Weiss, courtesy of the artist.

Eloquence in Clay and Carbon

2011-07-27T08:02:00.001-07:00

Eloquence in Clay and Carbon
By Tom Wachunas

“Clay. It’s rain, dead leaves, dust, all my dead ancestors. Stones that have been ground into sand. Mud. The whole cycle of life and death.” – Martine Vermeulen –

“Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.” – Gunter Grass –

In the grand scheme of humanity’s passion for making stuff out of other stuff, we can credit the harnessing of fire in the development of some of our most ancient mediums. It’s not unreasonable to think of the first stoneware vessels as inventive responses to the accidental discovery of solidified clay at the bottom of a fire pit. A similar eureka moment might have happened in the noticing of powdery black marks left on the skin after touching cooled wood embers. Thank God for opposable thumbs. Prometheus had the vision and chutzpah to see fire’s possibilities and wrest it from Zeus’s stingy hands. The rest, as they say, is art history.

While making any kind of art is to be joined to the existential continuum of human creativity, I’ve always thought there’s something particularly primordial – even cosmic - about working with clay or charcoal. As an artist’s hand caresses the visceral simplicity and easy movability of these earth-born substances, even the subtlest of finger movements or pressures can cause a mark to appear here, an impression or gentle swelling there. A magical call-and-response between the artist’s will (whether meandering or directed) and the material’s surrender.

There is an arresting spirituality about many of the works by Ron Watson and Bob Yost currently on view in “Making Marks” at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton. Yost is a ceramist who makes interesting-enough clay vessels. But it’s his wall pieces – decorative tile plaques of a sort - that intrigue me here. More specifically, his pieces that employ cobalt-blue glaze on white or near-white grounds are stunning in their meditative, abstract simplicity, and bring to mind ancient Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. That kinship is furthered by Yost’s wispy blue glaze configurations that float in gentle splashes atop his grids of little square tiles - like calligraphy rendered in the tradition of Oriental brush-and-ink scroll drawings. Spontaneous, lyrical, quiet. The Zen of the clay.

There is a distinctly timeless quietude, too, in the charcoal drawings by Ron Watson. They’re dark, but not in any negative, brooding, or off-putting way. His landscapes are masterfully controlled, contemplative fields of marks both lushly accumulated and softly rubbed, or perhaps partially erased, to allow for the presence of light. And even at their most weighty and saturated, the blacks are just delicate enough to reveal fascinating, intricate textures. I’m reminded of the hypnotic, calming effect of staring at a campfire and how, with burnt sticks of wood, Watson has magically rendered elegant visual tone poems. Compelling invitations to be mesmerized.

Photo, courtesy The Little Art Gallery: “Twilight” vine charcoal by Ron Watson. On view THROUGH AUGUST 20, at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton. (330) 499-4712, ext. 312

What Were They Thinking?

2011-07-16T09:39:00.001-07:00

What Were They Thinking?
By Tom Wachunas

“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.” –Paul Gauguin-

“Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.” –Susan Sontag-

“This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.” –Salvador Dali-

“Art, modern or otherwise, has always been a record of the artist’s decision-making process. If we are to fully understand it, we need to know what or who, exactly, colored those decisions. Then again, there’s the counter-intuitive idea that some of our most memorable art is indiscernible from utter mystery.”
-June Godwit-

When I started teaching at Kent Stark nearly five years ago, the name of the course was ‘Art Survey’. Rolls off the tongue quite nicely, and there’s just a distinct enough separation from ‘Art History.’ Art Survey. Really, it’s a euphemism for Art Appreciation. But recently the course name was changed to ‘Art as a World Phenomenon.’ Whatta mouthful. It tempts me to refer to it in acronym form: AAWP. Cute if not aawkward. I think the powers that be wanted to assure a better, more balanced and relevant embrace of global concepts of art.

I’m currently engaged in teaching a somewhat truncated version of the course, crammed into a measley 4 weeks (meeting for four evening sessions of two hours each per week), rather than a whole semester. Particularly when we encounter some radical and challenging 20th century works, there have been moments when I’ve felt sufficiently boggled enough to silently rename the beast ‘Art as Rapidly Grown Global Hokum,’ the acronym, appropriately enough, being AARGGH (he moaned).

As it is, negotiating the text book for the course is an exercise in judicious presentation. Now in this Summer abbreviation, teaching the course brings to mind images of winning a 5-minute shopping spree at Walmart or Target. So much to grab, so little time. I admit that while the course is certainly intended to instill a generalized grasp of art’s (and artists’) reasons and riddles - as well as results – it’s also a glimpse into my own passion for the stuff. And that’s where I need to be careful. I can muck up the already overwhelming works with my own predispositions. I’m not there to dictate what’s loveable or detestable so much as arm my students with the wherewithal to make intelligent assessments for themselves, and, more important, enjoy the process of it.

It’s challenging enough to present various methods of understanding and evaluating movements like Cubism, or Duchamp’s 1917 submission of a urinal to a prestigious French juried art show, or Pollock’s action paintings, or Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings. Things can get really dicey as I search the room for glimmers of comprehension when we (OK, I, mostly) talk about the 1965 Dusseldorf ‘performance’ by Joseph Beuys wherein he, his face slathered with gold leaf and honey, talked to a dead rabbit in his arms.

And speaking of performance art, there was a time, had I been teaching about the subject long ago in a land far away, when I would have killed a few birds with one stone by walking into class one day and, while fully and quickly disrobing, pronounced with mock solemnity something like, “All you need to know today about Postmodernism is that it is the ongoing decision to re-think all the decisions of Modernism.” Then I would walk out of the room. Class dismissed.

Note to my students (whom I have politely asked but not required to read my blog): Ain’t gonna happen. I love my job too much to lose it by foisting such a felonious and absurd assault on your minds and eyes. I’ll find other ways to lead you through the enthralling labyrinth of AAWP. I’d better get busy. AARGGHhhhh.

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Guerrillas

2011-07-08T14:59:00.001-07:00

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Guerrillas
By Tom Wachunas

“…and the thing that disturbs you is only the sound of the low spark of high-heeled boys.”
- lyrics by Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi -

Since its beginnings several years ago, the Acme Artists space in downtown Canton has rarely failed to stir up my memories – both fond and loathsome - of the New York City ‘alternative art’ scene of the 1980s. Back then I ran with a noisy, mischievous crowd of unevenly talented wannabes and couldabeens who were mad as hell and weren’t gonna take it anymore.

We were mad at the exclusive Uptown and SoHo galleries that called the shots and garnered the critics’ attentions, not to mention astronomical art prices. We were the disgusted, the disgruntled, the disenfranchised (and jealous). We became an underground avant garde. We were the ‘art guerrillas’ who commandeered abandoned storefronts and warehouses to mount impromptu exhibitions - ‘art attacks’ - that farted in the general direction of those blue-chip art profiteers and aficionados who touted the likes of Julian Schnabel’s awful broken china paintings. We were iconoclasts at heart and none too pure or simple.

Much of the art generated by this anarchy (my own included) was deliberately incomprehensible if not outright hideous, even by the strange ‘standards’ of the then newly-blossoming school of “Bad Painting”. So it’s not out of any sense of unqualified pride that I share these memories. I tell you this not because I think Acme Artists represents an exact duplication of those days’ attitudes or practices. Rather, it’s that Acme seems to embody a similarly bold, broad spirit of hit-‘em-and-run experimentation and planned unpredictability. Like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. If what’s there tastes too crunchy, bitter, or stale, wait a few days and come back. The place is an ever- revolving/evolving emporium of works by some of Canton’s ‘edgier’ artists.

Case in point: the current show (which may or may not be intact by the time you read this) called “Buffy’s Rules”. Buffy, of course, is Holly Buffy Atkinson, and she’s organized works by 13 other artists for this collective interpretation of her “rules”. Rules for what? While there are some specifics - like kindness to animals, approved sports, social behavior, and fashion – the overall thematic content spans a wide, somewhat ambiguous spectrum. For example, part of the exhibit is comprised of decidedly risqué works displayed behind a heavy red velvet curtain. ‘Adult’ content, to be sure. I’m not sure if Atkinson’s greeting cards there, featuring vintage photos of partially nude women in suggestive situations, are meant to be a celebratory show of tolerance for ‘alternative’ life styles, or simply an arbitrary symbol of artistic freedom masquerading as kinky sensationalism? Or both?

There is a substantial number of remarkable individual works here by well-known known local artists who have been consistently present in past Acme exhibits. One painter here is new to me, though – Joe Cortese, who has several works on display. A few of them, particularly behind the curtain, are dreadfully meandering, semi-abstract affairs of questionable intent and quality. Some of his paintings in the main part of the gallery are relatively more resolved, and indicate a unique, intriguing visual language that might still be in its infancy – a melding of sharply defined, ornate, graffiti-like geometries clustered and floating in slightly blurred fields of patterns. Decorative, yes, but in color and surface, visceral and brooding.

In some ways the paintings are problematic, but they do show considerable promise. And they nonetheless seem right at home in this space, bringing to mind, once again, that over-used e-word: edgy. I’m as guilty as anyone in resorting to the term too often, realizing full well that it’s become a generic catchall, a euphemism for ‘challenging’ or ‘outside the box’. Worse, it’s too often used to somehow legitimize and praise unremarkable work of no consequence, as in utter garbage. But that’s not the case here.

When I think of ‘edgy’ these days, it generally connotes ‘uneasy’ or ‘precipitous’. As in walking along an unfamiliar, even threatening path. Uncomfortable. Acme Artists has never been about exclusively safe, vapidly pretty, or easy art. In all its variety, much of it certainly palatable, there is in this show some typically challenging and difficult work to digest. Art can be that way sometimes. And that, I would think, is one of Buffy’s Rules.

“Buffy’s Rules” at Acme Artists until it’s not, 332 Fourth Street NW, downtown Canton. (330) 452 – 2263 www.acmeartists.com

Two-Faced Us, Articulated

2011-07-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Two-Faced Us, Articulated
By Tom Wachunas

“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” - Romans 7:18-20 –

History has bequeathed us myriad philosophies and commentaries on ‘The Problem of Evil’. That would include examinations of exactly what humanity’s first sin was. Many have made the case that our dismissal from Eden was the consequence of disobedience. Just as many have cited pride. And let’s not forget lust – essentially the desire to possess, at any cost, what we don’t have. Or how about greed – the blinding compulsion to possess more than we need just because we think we can? And so it goes.

History also illuminates our capacity to sense, define, and categorize what is both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ about us. Virtues and vices. Right and wrong. We’re instinctively (spiritually) called to obligatory behaviors, ethical codes of conduct. While we certainly seem to agree in theory that love is preferable to hate, all behavioral evidence indicates the dual-nature of humanity as in a war between spirit and flesh, an incessant struggle between our higher and lower natures. It’s not just in the academic (sociological/military/ political) chronologies of cultures or civilizations where we encounter such evidence, but certainly in our art history as well. Recognizing and expressing the numinous (divine) aspects of our existence – the strivings toward the theosis of humanity – has been a recurring, at times even dominant theme in artmaking across many cultures, Western and otherwise.

The new exhibit at Anderson Creative, called “Of Vice & Virtue: The Moral Universe of Marcy Axelband”, is neither a declaration of the artist’s perfected arrival at oneness with God, nor a preachy, new definition of morality. Axelband’s canvases are thoughtful, often gripping metaphors, in the form of portraits, for the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Cardinal Virtues. And it’s true that when I saw ‘moral’ and ‘universe’ in the same phrase, my internal GPS (God Positioning System) kicked in and to some degree filtered the material’s appearance, both visually (outward) and conceptually (inward). So while there might be something vaguely, arguably ‘religious’ afoot here, the work clearly exudes an overarching spirituality. Intriguingly so.

Let’s start with outward appearances. Axelband’s painterly language is that of a self-described “outsider” – an artist not formally trained in traditional studio practices. This is not to say her imagery is in any way unduly eccentric, crude or ‘ugly’. By classical standards her figurations are somewhat simplistic and awkward. But this lack of ‘naturalistic’ refinement (not to be confused with lack of drawing ability) gives her portraits a compelling, raw immediacy. Often, in their tactile surfaces alive with raised ripples of underpainting, flurries of scratches, and shapes reformed and repainted, they look as if they’ve recently emerged from a struggle, victorious and confident if not a little battle-weary. Adding to the paintings’ visceral physicality are the frames – thin metal strips attached with highly visible masonry nails – as if to literally nail down the ephemeral content. The scarred earthiness of the faces is a dramatic counterpoint to the electrifying, saturated colors that make up many of the backgrounds, or the simplified forms of the figures’ clothing. Distinctly vivid, yet never gratuitously lurid, Axelband’s esthetic is a contemplative melding of form and function, and one that serves the subject at hand very well: the human yearning to peacefully balance conflicting ethical/moral dichotomies.

Now for the inward. Each painting is accompanied by the artist’s musings on a vice or virtue. Her writing is charmingly sensitive, fluid, concise, and disarmingly frank. Particularly interesting are the beginnings of the definitions of various vices, all cut from the same fabric, as it were, of laziness. For example: Lust is “Too lazy to love.” Gluttony is “Too lazy to consider others’needs.” Wrath (Anger) is “Too lazy to consider the consequences of vengeful acts.”

And so it is all the more fascinating that one of only two overtly abstract works here is about selflessness. “Generosity” is an edge-to-edge field comprised of hundreds (thousands?) of loosely drawn, empty squares. A nearby tray holds tubes of paint and a few brushes, with an invitation for us as viewers to fill in as many of the tiny blanks as we want to with color. Then we are asked to go out into our world and perform a generous act equivalent to the number of squares we’ve painted in. An invitation to be not lazy. It’s a delightfully potent form of interactive art.

In enunciating her symbols of human desires and behaviors – beautifully refined in their way - this intensely facile outsider engages us in a dialogue that transcends private meditation. It’s an enthralling dialogue that reveals Axelband’s personal “moral universe” to be neither inaccessible nor all that separate from our own. So paint in some squares. We’re all in this together.

Photo, courtesy Craig Joseph: “Meekness” by Marcy Axelband, on view THROUGH JULY 30 at Anderson Creative, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery hours are Noon to 5 p.m Wednesday - Saturday www.andersoncreativestudio.com

Sublime Brevities

2011-06-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

Sublime Brevities
By Tom Wachunas

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” - Novalis –

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” - T.S.Eliot –

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” - G.K.Chesterton –

Methinks Chesterton may have been a cheese connoisseur, but don’t quote me on that. I’m willing to bet, though, that since he posited the observation quoted above, at least a few ‘modern’ poets have regaled us in one way or another with the glories of coagulated milk curd. Then again, many would-be poetry readers might share satirist Russell Baker’s ennui over modern poetry when he at one point whined that “…most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.” Well, boo hoo. Let them eat cheese.

But seriously. It seems to me that poets and poetry have got a fragile hold on the short end of the big media attention stick these days. We crave our blockbuster novels, our bold, scandalous celebrity autobiographies and chilling confessionals, and all manner of new-age self-help drivel because, quite simply, we’re told to. A conditioned response. The megamarketing machines of the publishing world are a collective Pied Piper, too easily leading us down blissfully banal paths to the latest, most sensationalistic literary doings of the day. Trending never ending.

Maybe it’s the flawed perception that poetry is too private and brief, too arcane and strange, seemingly inaccessible and irrelevant to minds numbed by the grandiosities of “popular entertainment”. To be fair, poetry can be thoroughly challenging - by its very nature alternately intimate, mystifying, and even nonsensical in its manipulations of language. Yet it is poetry’s often beautiful (and yes, sometimes maddening) indeterminacy that imbues it with its truly artful, unique wonder - a wonder too often swallowed up and forgotten as we feast on other culturally dominant menus. And I admit that it’s been far too long since I’ve slowed down long enough to really taste and savor good poetry.

I’m happily reminded of all this by a superb new 157-page anthology of poetry and short prose called “Turning Leaves”, edited by Dr. Audrey Lavin and Dr. Ray Gehani (both of whom having entries in the book). The book is comprised of works by 30 Northeast Ohio writers, and grew out of the Wednesday Writers Workshop. Aside from the skillfully wrought pieces from 21 poets, the short prose entries – both fiction and non-fiction – are equally sharp, engrossing, and often ‘poetic’ in their own right. Most impressive is the collective depth of vision, styles, and poignant thematic content. Its emotional and spiritual scope is remarkably wide, providing a warm embrace of life’s joy, sorrow, mystery, whimsicality, and humor that is as edifying as it is genuinely entertaining.

Reading this compelling, inspiring montage is like pouring over a journal of world views that range from searingly personal to profoundly familiar. Rest assured that these literary musings aren’t indulgent, cryptic notes passed between disillusioned aliens bemoaning a cruel or absurd cosmos. They are, each in their own way, intimate and evocative reports from the hearts and minds of very observant human artists, fully engaged with living here and now.

The book (paperbound) “Turning Leaves” (WWW Creative Publishers, ISBN: 0615455860 / ISBN 13: 97806115455860 ) is available at Amazon ($12.95), or can be purchased directly ($10.00 plus postage) by emailing lavingroup@aol.com Also check out Audrey Lavin at www.audreylavin.com and her blog, Whodunit?, at http://bit.ly/flTthc

Photo: “The Reader”, oil by Claude Monet

Their Rightful Place

2011-06-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

Their Rightful Place
By Tom Wachunas

“Some women like to sew to calm their nerves, but I paint books.” - Claude Raguet Hirst -

After the Italian painter Artemesia Gentileschi died in 1652, it wasn’t long before her amazing paintings were all but completely forgotten, lost, or attributed to either her father (who taught her in the ways of Caravaggio) or other Baroque male masters. Sometimes when I look at reproductions of her jarring “Judith Slaying Holofernes” in the history books, I can’t help but sense that her imagery of heroic (usually Biblical) women exacting retribution on miscreant men was both somehow ironic and prophetic.

The art world of her time and long after was a man’s world. The idea of women art students apprenticing to male masters of the day (unless they were family) was simply not encouraged. These days most historians and curators rank Gentileschi not only a truly significant painter among all painters of her era, but also among the greatest women to ever wield a brush. But Gentileschi’s arduous journey into its rightful historic place points to the long-standing sexual/social exclusionary biases that kept women artists unseen in the shadows of male-dominated rule- making.

Fast forward to 1986 New York City. At that time, the Guerilla Girls were a very active, in-your-face coalition of artists whose ‘performances’ shed harsh light on art establishment biases. One of their posters asked, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Printed next to the image of Ingres’ reclining nude “Grande Odalisque” (her head replaced by that of a snarling gorilla) was the text, “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” We’ve presumably made some progress in the last 25 years.

This evolving perception and role of women in the art world is well-addressed in the curator’s statement accompanying an exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA) of approximately 50 works from the permanent collection by women from the 19th to 21st centuries. Therein we read, for example, that Claude Raguet Hirst (born Claudine in 1855) “…assumed a male name to avoid sexual bias and assure that her work was taken seriously.” Seriously indeed. Her intimately scaled painting here (pictured above), called “An Interesting Book”, is a masterpiece in the trompe l’oeil still life tradition , all the more breathtaking when you consider that it’s a watercolor.

Breathtaking, too, are the watercolors by Patricia Tobacco Forrester and Carolyn Brady. Both are heroic departures from the standard smaller- size format so commonly practiced in watercolor painting. The similarly scaled acrylic and colored pencil “Still Life with Silver Bowl and White Cup” by Jeanette Pasin Sloan is astonishing in its precision, lavish patterns, and the stunningly rendered reflections of a room that appear on the inside rim of the bowl.

Jennifer Bartlett’s woodcut/silkscreen “At Sea, Japan” is an elegant, abstracted bird’s eye- view of reflections on water and the darting movements of fish clustered beneath the surface. For all of its dramatic, rapturous progression of colors, and almost palpably kinetic energy, it exudes a fluid peace. And it’s a Zen-like serenity that characterizes the four stoneware vessels by Toshiko Takaezu – quiet, simple sentinels of rich earthiness.

These are but some of the more remarkable works, barely scratching the surface of the depth, mastery, and variety of genres so abundantly evident in this show. It’s a show that once again amply demonstrates the formidable level of curatorial discernment that makes the CMA permanent collection so thrilling.

In today’s world, the flawed practices and assumptions that ignored or marginalized women artists aren’t a hot-button issue, thankfully. In fact it would be ludicrous and even criminal to think that women are in any way a “less-than” class of artists who still have miles to go and something to prove. They’ve been there, done that. So call this show a lovingly compiled and important reminder of (with apologies to The Grateful Dead) what a long, strange – and beautiful – trip it’s been. And continues to be.

Photo, courtesy www.cantonart.org, “An Interesting Book” watercolor by Claude Raguet Hirst, on view through July 24 at the Canton Museum of Art, (330) 453 - 7666

For Brennis, Second April's Effluent Spiral of Friends

2011-06-22T07:44:00.000-07:00

For Brennis, Second April’s Effluent Spiral of Friends
By Tom Wachunas

Hanging in my home are still a few assemblages from 2001- 2002 that I exhibited at Second April Galerie’s inaugural location on Cleveland Avenue. Not a day goes by when they don’t pleasantly remind me of my first meetings with gallery founders/ proprietors Brennis Booth and his partner, Todd Walburn. It was their sincerely encouraging, enthusiastic response to those then- new pieces that further fueled a personal “renaissance” after a long (10 years) and difficult hiatus from making art. I’ve been showing work at their gallery ever since, and can’t be grateful enough.

Long before there was any of the hype and hooplah about downtown Canton’s “arts explosion” there was Second April Galerie. When it relocated to Sixth Street Northwest in 2003, it was a wondrously strange and beguiling oasis, a lone salon of artistic possibility. But this once cultural anomaly in a practically (but for the historic Palace Theater) forgotten urban landscape represented a truly seminal, daring vision that would go on to inspire a phenomenal in-kind community response. Since moving to its current Cleveland Avenue address in 2007, in the heart of what’s now routinely called the arts district, Second April Galerie is still very much a magnetic, vital presence in the transformed (and still transforming) downtown arts milieu. Again, I can’t be grateful enough.

And so, in the wake of Brennis Booth’s recent ordeal with major heart surgery, it thrills me to the marrow to see the appearance of The Brennis Bunch, some 217 individuals (at last count) gathered on Facebook. Many thanks to artist Sarah Winther Shumaker for initiating it, and to all who have signed on. This ebullient, indeed phenomenal outpouring of care and support for Brennis and Todd is a marvelous testament to the impact they continue to so lovingly make on the arts community and beyond. Meanwhile…

Dear Brennis,
During and long after your time of healing and recuperation, may you remain, as the name of your gallery suggests, a constancy of bright renewal and inspiration to us all. God Bless you and yours.

Photo: “Rose to the Occasion” (2002), assemblage by Tom Wachunas

Oztensibly,Toto-ly Invigorating

2011-06-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

Oztensibly, Toto-ly Invigorating
By Tom Wachunas

There I was, on opening night of the Players Guild production of The Wizard of Oz, happily anticipating the haunted forest scene. By this point I had successfully disabused myself of the fruitless temptation to make too many comparisons to the 1939 movie classic. But before any staged version of that iconic, chilling decent of the winged monkeys could transpire, the frightened foursome (Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion) are attacked by the pesky “Jitterbug” sent by the Wicked Witch to, as she had just explained to her minions, “take the fight out of them.” Once bitten, the victims helplessly succumbed to paroxysms of dancing the - you guessed it – Jitterbug.

This scene never made it into the movie. Some have since posited that it would have dated the film too specifically, or that the dance - regarded as somewhat scandalous in its day - was a bit too adult for young audiences (an objection that seems laughable by today’s standards). In any event, aided by Michael Lawrence Akers’ effectively expressive choreography, the dance was here performed by all – including Mary Vaccani as the Jitterbug - with delicious abandon. And in that, the frenetic number embodied the remarkably supple energy of this production as a whole, inventively directed by Craig Joseph.

He wisely chose to bring to light a refreshingly different dimensionality to many of the scenes, songs, and characters that the film had so firmly cemented into our memories and expectations. “NO ONE, “ he writes in his program notes, “can be Judy Garland or Bert Lahr like Judy Garland or Bert Lahr.” True enough. Nonetheless, this fine cast, while certainly honoring the original script with notable skill and faithfulness, injects it with some surprisingly new, exciting flavors. In singing “If I Only Had a Brain”, The Scarecrow is joined by three hilariously heckling crows . Tin Man’s “If I Only Had a Heart” is rendered a la vintage crooner style from radio shows of old, backed up by harmonies by three cantankerous apple trees.

Brittany Hines’ portrayal of Dorothy is authentically youthful and fetching, yet strongly tempered with a visceral confidence beyond her years. She sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” not so much with sweet, wounded longing as with soaring, urgent determination. The performances by her traveling companions are equally credible. Joe Shipbaugh’s Scarecrow has an eminently loveable, lithe swagger; Jason A. Green brings real warmth and vulnerability to his Tin Man; and Stephen Ostertag is riveting as the Cowardly Lion, hilariously negotiating his character’s oscillating nerves.

With the intriguing performances by Lisa Belopotosky Knight as Glinda the Good Witch, along with that of Cheryl Henderson as The Wicked Witch of the West, you’ll surely get the feeling you’re not in the movie anymore. This Glinda is both refined and sassy, given to delicious moments of earthy savoir-faire, like spraying air freshener after the Wicked Witch’s departure from Munchkin Land (speaking of which, the 11 children playing Munchkins are adorable, most notably the two tikes representing The Lollipop Guild, with their hitch-up-your-pants boyish toughness). Additionally, the Wicked Witch in this production is something of a sensual Goth fashion queen with a superiority complex. Her unconvincing cackling is more bravado than outright evil. And of course it’s exposed bravado that reveals the supposedly fierce Wizard to be just a contrite, well- meaning man, genuinely played here by Don Jones.

Once again, conductor/keyboardist Steve Parsons and his 11-piece orchestra provide a lively, sharply arranged backdrop to the proceedings, and Joshua Erichsen has designed several very effective set tableau pieces. Kudos, too, to costume designers Susie Smith and Leslie DeStefano. But of all the stage machinations and “special effects” at work here (and that would include the clever depiction of a Kansas tornado via several wildly twirling dancers), none is more suitable to the task than the real dog ( not named in the program – oh the shame of it!) who plays Toto. Each time the docile little long- hair appeared on stage, on cue to a fault, whispery waves of appreciative oohs and aahs rose from the audience. He (or she) added an endearing bit of polish to this already shiny, magical evening.

Photo, by James Dreussi: Left to Right, Jason A. Green as the Tin Man, Stephen Ostertag as the Cowardly Lion, Brittany Hines as Dorothy, Joe Shipbaugh as the Scarecrow. Canton Players Guild Theatre production of THE WIZARD of OZ, shows through July 10, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Players Guild Mainstage, 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton. To order tickets, call (330) 453 – 7617 or visit www.playersguildtheatre.com

Tangible Light, Solid Air

2011-06-15T02:55:00.001-07:00

Tangible Light, Solid Air
By Tom Wachunas

“I take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of earth. My sculptures are an expression of gratitude, a search for parallel, tangible, formal experiences that can be shared with others…I sculpt light and emptiness. Whenever possible, I penetrate a rock or a tree trunk. Not to subdue it, but to open it up. Open for eyes to walk through, traverse, wonder, imagine, remember, touch…and understand.”
-Barbara Stanczack -

Rounding out the exhibition by five women artists in “A Celebration of Women in the Arts: Director’s Choice II” at the Canton Museum of Art are 19 works by sculptor Barbara Stanczack (wife of the prominent abstractionist Julian Stanczack). And ‘rounding’ is a good way to begin sensing what her pieces are about. Round, as in curvaceous, organic forms. Fecund volumes. Brimming pregnancies of light and space, literal and implied.

Her contemplative sculptures are sensual, evocative celebrations of her enthrallment with wood and stone. Their simplicity isn’t of the kind so common to the cold, emotionally detached rawness of Minimalism. Rather, these are elegant, intuited harmonies between the artist’s graceful manipulation of the physical forms, and her respect for the intrinsic nature of the material at hand. It’s an honest, warm, and seductive symbiosis.

“Bulbous” looks to be a salvaged oak stump, split so as to expose an interior sealed with paper-thin, iridescent copper flashing. It’s an intriguing duet of materials, arresting and a resting, not unlike mother-of-pearl inside a shell. Indeed, there are other works here rendered to suggest the convex-concave configurations of sea shells, as in the stunning “Marking Time”. This is a spectacular, large piece of onyx which is, but for a few chiseled spots on its angled underside, polished to a sleek finish. With its richly translucent striations of green and reddish brown bands pressed amid layers of microcrystalline quartz, this single stone conjures an entirely ancient, mesmerizing and exotic landscape.

Exotic, too, is the nearby “Tip Toe Through My Garden”, with its five undulating flowers made of cypress wood. These upright blooms taper to rounded points, seeming to defy gravity. Similarly, the white forms made from Italian translucent alabaster in “Butterfly Wings” seem impossibly delicate and airy atop their sparkling stone perch.

If there is such a thing as earthly sacraments, then these works, born of timeless natural substances, are subtly sacramental. They are signs of things at once ostensible and obscured. Quietly mysterious, in manifesting the outward signs of the artist’s hand – her physical actions – they guide us toward a spiritual action of sorts, which is our inward communion with her sense of delight and discovery.

Michelangelo once wrote, “The best artist has that thought alone which is contained within the marble shell; the sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free the figure slumbering in the stone.” It is, I think, a gentle breaking that Stanczack has engaged. As she has stated, it is not a breaking to conquer or subdue, but to reveal, and to present the possibility of our sharing in her gratitude for “the beauty and wonder of earth.”

In breaking the ‘spell’ mentioned by the Renaissance master, Stanczack lavishes us with marvelously sumptuous revelations, and in the process, holds us spellbound.

Photo, from barbarastanczack.com : “Marking Time”, onyx, on view through July 24 at the Canton Museum of Art, located in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Ave. North. (330) 453-7666.
www.cantonart.org

A History Runs Through It

2011-06-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

A History Runs Through It
By Tom Wachunas

Historically, the potent efficacy of photography lies in its re-presenting a reality, whether literally or figuratively, forever preserving the essence of a moment, a person, a place, or a thing. The motivations for making photographs are many, but I think none is more compelling or universal than the desire to somehow defeat mortality and offer lasting proof of life beyond its time. To remember. And in our remembering – our savoring of what is no longer tangibly “real” or physically in front of us - photographs are often invitations to place something of ourselves in the frame, as it were, and enrich our present by re-entering the past. This is particularly true of vintage portraiture.

The current exhibit at The Massillon Museum, called “Faces of Rural America”, is the very stunning – indeed beautiful - culmination of two years of work by museum research teams, presenting 100 photographic portraits by Belle Johnson (1864-1945) of Monroe City, Missouri, and Henry Clay Fleming (1845-1942) of Ravenswood, West Virginia. The photographers each worked for decades (from late 19th century and onward) as their respective small town’s sole professional portrait artists. The show occupies two floors of the museum – the main floor gallery dedicated to Fleming’s work, and the second floor to Johnson’s. I highly recommend that you view the fascinating video that accompanies each exhibit, with interviews and observations about the artist and town.

Many of Johnson’s portraits have a more refined visual grace and crispness about them when compared to those of Fleming, who seemed to have been somewhat looser in the sharp-focus department. Additionally, Fleming used glass-plate negatives for the duration of his career, while Johnson apparently stayed in step with more contemporary technological developments as they unfolded. Many of Fleming’s images have in turn acquired an intriguing aesthetic element impossible to have been foreseen by him. Due to the glass negatives being stored in less than optimal conditions for some 60 years, the irreparable damage gives those prints a magnificently eerie kind of blooming frame effect.

What I find most appealing about this exhibit, though, goes beyond just the studio practices of the artists, or any comparative analyses of formal elements. Viewing the portraits collectively is to be utterly immersed in another world, really. There is an astonishingly diverse range of faces, walks of life, and moods present. Men, women, babies and children. Couples, families. Rich, poor. Expressions that are playful, scowling, angelic, demure, contemplative, proud, tired, enigmatic. Wondrous, lyrical humanity.

Another notable and thoughtful aspect of the show is the inclusion of four local artists (including myself – more on that shortly) who were commissioned by Massillon Museum Executive Director Alexandra Nicholis to fabricate textural interpretations of a photo of their choice. Call them 3-D translations intended to be “read” by museum visitors who are blind. But the invitation to touch those works – surely a unique and refreshing one in a museum context – is open to all viewers. And so it is that Clare Murray Adams, Brittany Steigert, and Joseph Close responded with remarkable skill and sensitivity in producing renditions startlingly true to the photos and visually enthralling in their own right.

It’s an honor to be in their company, and I admit to being somewhat envious of how they stayed so faithful to “actual” photo textures and accuracy of scale. My own submission took relatively greater liberties in copying formal proportions of the Fleming photo I chose (shown here). But it’s the photo’s amazingly complicated and dominating “damage” that wields such a poetic grip. At first blush the boys seem to be swallowed up in chaos. I chose to enlarge on their rising from, not their disappearing into, the ravages of time.

And in the end, it’s a similarly romantic spirit that’s at the heart of this exhibit – a spirit of persistence, of emergence. The people portrayed here, charmingly shrouded in sepia and misty greys, are long gone from our midst. But through the tender art of their portrayers, these echoes of an era enter and adorn our awareness - if only for the time it takes to view this show – like gentle ghosts.

Photo: Portrait of Two Boys, one partially obscured, by Henry Clay Fleming. On view at Massillon Museum THROUGH OCTOBER 9, 121 Lincoln Way E. in downtown Massillon. Viewing hours are 9:30 a.m to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Saturday, and 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday (330) 833 - 4061
Info at www.massillonmuseum.org or www.facesofruralamerica.org

In Living Black and White

2011-06-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

In Living Black and White
By Tom Wachunas

“…everything looks worse in black and white.” - Paul Simon, from “Kodachrome”

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
- Diane Arbus –

“Life is like a good black and white photograph; there’s black, there’s white, and lots of shades in between.” - Karl Heiner –

Our word “color” comes originally from the Old Latin noun ‘colos’, meaning a covering, related to the verb ‘celare’ - to conceal or to hide. It seems an ironic word meaning, really, when we consider how much power we assign to color in revealing what we think of as particular qualities of the visual world. Certain colors connote warmth, joyous optimism, or fiery passion, while others conjure cold, distant things, loneliness, or isolation. We’ve become accustomed to how the visible spectrum of light resonates with us emotionally. In art, we praise an artist’s mastery of color’s luminosity and intensity, and its capacity to manipulate our perception. In this polychromatic world that can be photographically imitated, translated, and supposedly improved upon via ever more sophisticated digital tinkering, how has the hallowed tradition of black and white photography been faring?

Move over Roy G. Biv and Paul Simon. The world is not necessarily best – and certainly not always – viewed through rainbow lenses. Case in point: the current showing of approximately 40 photographs by Jan Bell in his exhibit called “An Intimate View” at The Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography.

Yes, there are marvelous color photographs here that, as the show’s title indicates, present intimate, very close-up visions from nature, all of them masterfully crisp and arresting. “Ripples on Water”, for example, with its intricate clusters of tiny white ridges afloat in luscious cerulean wavelets, is startlingly faithful to reality while being a stunning abstraction.

But for truly compelling visions of texture, tonality, and formal drama, Bell’s black and white photographs soar where color would seem to be a distraction. A monochromatic world, as so superbly demonstrated here, is neither boring nor complacent. His images, both from natural and urban settings, are eminently poetic and riveting. Many of them bring to mind the sleek sensuality of Edward Weston’s work, or the powerful visual majesty in the work of Ansel Adams.

Savor the undulating curves and sumptuous wrinkles of sand in “Dune Waves”, or the eerie tactility of “Resting Boulder”. Who knew a rock could speak such depth and mystery, or that grey areas could be so intense? There are myriad secrets in that surface tattooed by eons of geologic change.

Call me unashamedly old school, but sometimes I think our love affair with color can sabotage real, thoughtful seeing. The idea that black and white photography could reveal the deepest essence or spirit of a thing might seem too counter-intuitive, high-flown, and/or obsolete to some viewers and practitioners. Thankfully, this is one show that offers clear, engaging, and beautiful evidence to the contrary.

Photo, courtesy www.jsaxtongallery.com , “Dune Waves” by Jan Bell, on view THROUGH JULY 30, 520 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Phone (330) 438 – 0030. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5.

Their Just Deserts

2011-06-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Their Just Deserts
By Tom Wachunas

The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to a man’s most inmost parts.
- Proverbs 18:8 –

While many of you may take the title of this commentary to be a misspelling of an archaic phrase meaning ‘getting what they deserve’, I assure you it’s not. The apparent plural of an arid, sandy wasteland is in fact the original correct spelling, here pronounced ‘desserts’, as in after-dinner sweets.

I can also assure you that “Let Them Eat Cake”, the new play by Sherry Yanow and Deborah Fezelle (their fourth collaboration produced in Canton) that plays for one night only (Saturday, June 4) at Fieldcrest of North Canton, is anything but dry or archaic. Fezelle directed this engaging and facile comedy, and has assembled an equally facile cast to deliver the story that unfolds, in two Florida households, about two mothers on Mother’s Day, their sons, their sons’ girlfriends, and one nosy gossip.

And it’s there – the gossip – where the story begins. After repeatedly overhearing what she (mistakenly) takes to be late-night sexual shenanigans in her neighbor Kelly Fox’s apartment, Carmen Montoya phones her best friend, Hope Chancellor , and informs her that Alvin Chandler has been messing around with Kelly. That would be THE Alvin Chandler, the wildly rich, successful software mogul, and son to Brenda Chandler, who happens to be Carmen’s cousin. The two-fold problem is that Kelly is supposedly the sweet, devoted girlfriend of Hope’s veterinarian son, Brad. And Carmen knows that Alvin is ostensibly head-over-heels for Crystal Butterfield, a local weather girl. More phone calls from Carmen to both Hope and Brenda ensue, and the concerned mothers, thoroughly ensnared by rumor and innuendo, begin to pry more seriously into their sons’ respective romances.

On one level, the story brings to mind the famous moment in “Cool Hand Luke” when Strother Martin announces, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” The narrative web of this play becomes further tangled when we learn that Brenda is vehemently opposed to her son’s plan to marry Crystal, whom she knows to be a manipulative gold digger and ostentatious fraud. But Alvin is hopelessly blinded (not to mention an inexperienced nerd when it comes to relationships with women), and intent on surprising Crystal with an engagement ring hidden in a Mother’s Day cake. Meanwhile, Hope does all she can to encourage her reluctant son, Brad, terribly hurt by a past failed romance, to finally pop the question to Kelly, else lose her forever. To make matters worse (but in the end actually better), the bakery botches the two households’ cake orders, and in the confusion of similar last names, it’s Kelly who gets Crystal’s ring.

This marvelously crafted study in irony and romance has a practically Shakespearean flavor to its comedic narrative twists. All seven cast members are superbly suited to their roles, delivering them with palpable verve. As the busy-body Carmen, Janet Fashbaugh Mohler is deliciously funny and even naughty as she drops her “news” bombshells, seeming to relish the fallout as it lingers in the other characters’ reactions. Denise Robb, playing Brenda, is startlingly credible and urgent in her portrayal of the exasperated, pleading mother, and in her tense stand-offs - masterful moments of understated venom - with Crystal. An effective and equally urgent counterpoint is the character of Hope, played with authentic, fervent warmth by Marilyn Wells as she passionately encourages Brad to marry Kelly. In that role, Ariel Roberts is intriguing to watch as she emerges from dutiful and fawning girlfriend into honestly revealing her desires for married life with Brad, played by Drew Schaar. His is an intriguing transformation, too – from self-satisfied career man keeping marriage at arm’s length, to lowering his unreasonable defenses.

Joseph M. Haladey III is electrifyingly spot-on as the zany, immature, love-struck Alvin. For all of his character’s business acumen and hefty bank assets, he’s woefully poor (and just plain stupid) at recognizing how his desperation for a woman to love him for himself has lured him into Crystal’s conniving. In that role, Meagan Sonner is brilliant and sensual in an utterly decadent way – fully capturing all her character’s wanton greed, ill-founded self-assurance, and shallow deceit. It’s gratifying to report that the story provides for her well-earned comeuppance.

If there’s any bad news here it’s that this dinner-theater show runs for only one evening before moving on to performance in Springfield, Illinois. The good news is that as both director and playwright, Deborah Fezelle, and her extremely talented Top of the Town Productions company, continues to forge a viable and exciting presence here in the Canton area. Look for her next show - a political thriller to be mounted at the Kathleen Howland Theatre in August.

For tonight, there just might be tickets left at Fieldcrest of North Canton, 1346 Easthill St. SE, North Canton. Dinner at 6:30, followed by the show. Tickets are $30 and can be ordered by calling (330) 966 – 2222.

Photo, courtesy Deborah Fezelle: Cast of “Let Them Eat Cake” clockwise from bottom left: Joseph M. Haladey III, Meagan Sonner, Denise Robb, Janet Fashbaugh Mohler, Marilyn Wells, Drew Schaar, and Ariel Roberts.

Desiderata

2011-06-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

Desiderata
By Tom Wachunas

If it isn’t apparent to you by now from my last two posts, a visit to the Canton Museum of Art these days will place you firmly in thrall to women artists. “A Celebration of Women in the Arts: Director’s Choice II” is a thoroughly captivating group of exhibits not only in the main gallery, but also in the upper gallery that features the work of 55 women artists from the museum’s permanent collection. And let’s not forget the two “side” galleries either. The smaller of those two spaces has been given over to the work of Lisa Hertzi, while the larger spotlights that of Juliellen Byrne.

“Journey in Stitches: Art Doll Adventures” is the title of the showing by Lisa Hertzi. A doll-maker extraordinaire, Hertzi makes highly textured figures from wildly colored and patterned fabrics, skillfully interwoven with such things as yarn, feathers, stones, beads and wire. But these dolls are a few steps beyond just the ruddy-cheeked, plump facsimiles of human babies meant for little girls’ playtime. They do, though, have a childlike, giddy abandon about them, often to the point of outright funkiness. A few, like “Mazel-Tough” and “Dead Mari”, are puppet-like characters that look like they’d be right at home in one of Tim Burton’s quirky, humorously dark animations.

Most interesting about this eye-popping collection as a whole is its family resemblance to “primitive” figurines from various civilizations and eras that have clearly fascinated Hertzi. Many of her forms hint at ancestor totems or ritual artifacts from Africa, for example, or perhaps North American Hopi kachinas. In any case, these lovingly rendered, bright objects, in their suggestion of the “spirit catchers” from other cultures, can also be rightfully viewed as contemporary human spirit lifters.

While not as electrifyingly decorative as Hertzi’s dolls, there is nonetheless a totemic, doll-like quality about many of the clay sculptures by Juliellen Byrne in her exhibit called “Cradle Casket Boat”. But these figures, with their ambiguous expressions and ghostly, pale visages, seem like strange cousins of antique porcelain dolls, and are less overtly optimistic in mood, even if there are moments of innocent joy - as in “You’re Pretty Too”, wherein a baby exuberantly licks at the opened beak of a bird. “Toe Tag” is much more sobering. From the baby’s head, praying hands protrude, the torso swaddled in cards identifying dead soldiers. It’s a jarring remembrance of children who will grow up with no father.

To varying degrees, many of Byrne’s stunning figurations here exude a gently measured melancholy – sometimes latent, sometimes very present. These odd, even cryptic visions constitute a personal, symbolic iconography characterized by haunting juxtapositions of boats, bunnies, rats, babies, and grownups. They occupy a common emotional ground, described by Byrne as “…a consuming frustration about war, concerns about parenting, patriotism, and the politics of engagement in conflicts.” Byrne concludes her statement with, “Add to this, the darker fear that things like human trafficking, and corporate greed is part of the fabric of this civilized society and my little boat feels very small and not so safe.”

In as much as these works are codifications of human failings, fragility, and mortality, I think they’re also soulful calls to resolve universal dilemmas, to right our moral compass, to consider alternatives. To embrace the possibility of hope. And in that, they are eminently powerful embodiments of desire.

Photo, courtesy Canton Museum of Art: “Pope on Wheels” by Juliellen Byrne, on view THROUGH JULY 24 in the exhibit, “A Celebration of Women in the Arts: Director’s Choice II” at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 Market Avenue North in the Cultural Center for the Arts. Phone (330) 453 – 7666
www.cantonart.org

Redressing Naked Realities

2011-05-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Redressing Naked Realities
By Tom Wachunas

“It is what is painted between the outlines that makes the difference between merely competent painting and meaningful art.” - Philip Pearlstein –

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” - Genesis 3:7 –

At the tender age of seven I was taught by a nun, as all Catholic children were back then, to “examine my conscience” every Friday afternoon in preparation for Saturday’s visit to the confessional. With eyes closed, our heads sunk into the pillow of our folded arms on our desk tops, the dutiful Dominican would recite an inventory of sins we were to consider. One of those sins mystified me then, and for several years thereafter: “Have you had impure thoughts this week?” Of course the exact definition of such thoughts was always couched in the vaguest and cutely poetic of terms. Heaven forbid that a seven year-old boy should dwell too long on an art book picture of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” or Manet’s “Olympia”. It wasn’t until about sixth grade that a priest first asked me to really elaborate after I had muttered, “I had impure thoughts three times this week.”

This was at least as unnerving for the priest as it was for me. I doubt he’d ever heard one so young (or anyone else for that matter) describe Rubens’ “Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus” in such vivid detail. Never mind that it was all a bold-faced lie (in the hallowed darkness of the confessional!) to cover up the real source of my impure thoughts – discovering my older brother’s stash of Playboy magazines. By now I’m fairly sure you’re thinking I’ve revealed far more personal information than you want to know. It’s nonetheless interesting that my memory of such confessional encounters had remained long hidden beneath a cerebral fig leaf of sorts, until I recently dwelled on the paintings by Shirley Aley Campbell currently on view in “A Celebration of Women in the Arts: Director’s Choice II” at the Canton Museum of Art.

While there is a controlled if not hesitant delicacy to Campbell’s elegant abstracted ink drawings, particularly in her six smaller linear works under the title “Ode to Piero”, her oil works on canvas are a completely different, heavier matter. Not that these nudes drove me to the abyss of prurient longings and abject prayers for forgiveness, even if there is something distinctly abysmal about Campbell’s palette. Her undraped figures from life do share a kinship with the unflinching postmodern realism of Lucian Freud (though with a less eviscerated look), and Philip Pearlstein’s non-traditional perspectives and vantage points, though clearly without his enlivening color dynamics. The unabashedly candid world in which Campbell’s nudes pose and interact can be a dark and brooding one, though certainly sensual and voluptuous, even Rubenesque in an off-kilter way. The dim settings and somber tonalities might well be expressions of what Campbell tells us in her statement: “Anxieties persist in my paintings and I am suspended between the order I see and an apprehension that everything must, and does move.”

In “The Kiss”, two lip-locked, naked women embrace each other in a wide easy chair. Their surrounds, ironically enough, are a murky and stifling interior. Are we looking at a momentary sexual pleasure, a clandestine act, or the celebration of a lifestyle? And are we as viewers simply voyeurs, comfortable or otherwise? Anxieties and apprehension indeed. A similar sensibility – an ambiguous drama - seems to be at work in “Man-Woman” numbers 1 and 2. In the first, a robust man on his knees clutches at a standing older woman clad only in a wide-brimmed hat. She looks worried, ambivalent - both resistant and on the verge of surrender. Both figures are painted as if illuminated by an unseen, devilish red fire aglow in a dark, dense void. In number 2, they’re horizontal, though not fully engaged, so to speak.

With the emergence of 20th century mainstream modernism, classical perfection and “beauty” in painting the human figure was thenceforth considered an impotent banality. In turn, the postmodern resurgence of figurative Realism, where Campbell’s work finds itself ensconced, brought with it an energized attention to image as painted surface. And in that, Campbell is a seriously fine painter. Aside from the unsettling social, emotional, or moral territories her pictures might suggest or imply, I get the sense that as a keen observer of forms, she looks at every square inch of her models with an almost clinical intensity. Her painted anatomies seethe with mesmerizing passages of small, studied brush strokes. Not impasto surfaces, but quietly sumptuous just the same.

Viewing them from that perspective is a pleasure of which I remain…unrepentant.

Photo: “Violini de Roma” acrylic, charcoal and pencil, by Shirley Aley Campbell, on view at the Canton Museum of Art, 1001 through July 24. www.cantonart.org

In Pursuit of Possibilities

2011-05-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

In Pursuit of Possibilities
By Tom Wachunas

While Nyctea looked at the painting with that all too familiar far-away look in her eyes, Aegolius could no longer contain his silence. Or his rage.
“How can you approve of this, this…atrocity?” he moaned. “What could you possibly be thinking? How can you call this thing good?! It’s awful, just awful. What’s good about it?”
Nyctea looked at him, then back at the painting. She took a long, slow breath, and said, “Sometimes you just know that you know that you know. It’s that simple. That complex.”
- From “Mournings of the Grebes” by June Godwit –

I can well remember the contentious dialogues generated in my circle of New York City artist friends by the 1978 “Bad Painting” exhibition at The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Some were resentful, even a bit jealous, while others were simply offended. No doubt we were just a microcosm of common art world reactions. I also remember that after the initial furor had settled down, virtuous hindsight prompted some cooler heads to posit the notion that the show really wasn’t at all that new or revolutionary so much as it was a formalized revealing of what had been underfoot for years.

Nonetheless, the exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker, was to some degree a watershed moment in postmodern art developments. She described “Bad Painting” in the press release as “…an ironic title for ‘good painting’, which is characterized by deformations of the figure, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources, and fantastic and irreverent content. In its disregard for accurate representation and rejection of conventional attitudes about art, ‘bad’ painting is at once funny and moving, and often scandalous in its scorn for the standards of good taste.”

Read the artist’s statement that accompanies the paintings by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker now showing in the Canton Museum of Art’s “A Celebration of Women: Director’s Choice II.” She makes it clear that the “Bad Painting” show resonated greatly with the changing vocabulary that was already present at that time in her own work. It was a freer, more raw vocabulary that was evolving from her interest in right-brain/left-brain workings (connections and dis-connections), along with intentionally making images with her untrained, left hand – a deliberate eschewing of academic, traditional working methods and perceptions. Parker understood the essence of ‘bad’ painting to be “…a profound search to find one’s own unique means of expression in a world of infinite possibilities.”

Then, read the excellent essay written by Canton Museum of Art executive director M.J. Albacete for the beautiful color brochure that Parker has so generously provided here. Therein he writes that Parker’s work is best appreciated when absorbed in larger doses, as opposed to viewing just a single work. Only then can we begin to make sense of the life-long flow of aesthetic mazes that Parker continues to negotiate with ever-increasing, compelling verve. “Viewing one painting in isolation can be a puzzlement,” Albacete observes. True enough. “But in taking in five, or ten, or twenty altogether, a pattern emerges, the maze transforms into a labyrinth, and we can at last find our way to the center of her artistic core.” Truer still.

For many years that core has shown itself to be consistently bold, challenging, and at times even maddeningly cryptic, though always fresh, in abandoning the more predictable niceties of expressionistic painting. I think she’s well advanced beyond what might have been once a merely polemical aesthetic based on speaking modern art “vocabulary” fluently, into a newer, more intuitive, and exciting articulation of subtler dialects.

The big surprise in her group of paintings here, which does include a few of her more “trademark” visceral abstract explorations of scruffily drawn/thickly painted figurations, is a series of ten large (9’ x 6’), unstretched acrylic canvases, collectively called “Hommage Les Peintres Femmes (Homage to the Women Painters)”. These amazing pictures have a refined, architectural presence, and exude a serenely somber urgency. Ghostly and heroic, some incorporate a logo-like spiral form, reminiscent of ancient symbols of universal forces. Each panel is dedicated to a significant woman artist. Perhaps these haunting configurations are Parker’s personal tone poems - a symbolic witness to, and identification with, the essence of endless stepping out into a cosmic labyrinth of creativity.

Maybe one way to savor the pictorial possibilities that Parker offers us here is to in turn entertain another possibility for ourselves as viewers. Look, and don't let your right brain know what the left is looking at. It’s that simple. That complex. That marvelous.

Photo: “Eva” by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker. On view in “Director’s Choice II: A Celebration of Women in the Arts” at the Canton Museum of Art, through July 24, located in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Avenue N, Canton. www.cantonart.org

Radiance Redux

2011-05-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

Radiance Redux

By Tom Wachunas

Those of you who missed Diane Belfiglio’s show of oil pastels, “Transitions,” at the Butler Institute of American Art (February 13 through April 3), will hopefully be pleased to know that the exhibit, less five or six pieces, is currently on view in Studio M at the Massillon Museum. And if what follows here seems familiar, it’s because it’s an edited (considerably so) version of a post (my catalogue essay from the Butler show) from February. This spectacular exhibit rates a recap, if for no other reason than that it’s about time we jump into long awaited Spring.

It was not just an illusionistic light that I observed when I first encountered the work of Diane Belfiglio in 1998, but real sunlight that seemed to magically emanate from the picture plane itself. It was a pleasantly haunting light, faintly suggestive of Edward Hopper’s work without the loneliness, or the great Impressionists, such as Monet, sans impasto. How was this possible with such flatly applied acrylic paint? The artist had clearly mastered illuminated color and its subtle interactions with precisely rendered, hard-edge architectural forms and their shadows.

In the years following, Belfiglio continued to explore the aesthetic marriage of sunlight and architecture- the joining of the ephemeral to the physical – with consistently enthralling results. While maintaining a disciplined eye for tight structuring of well-defined shapes with intriguing perspectives, she would become ever more adept at imbuing her images with real warmth and optimism. For all of their crisp faithfulness to the recognizable world, her images never succumbed to the often cold and numbing flamboyance of Photorealism, even though the camera remains an invaluable tool in framing her imagery.

Since venturing into the medium of oil pastels in 2008 with her Jamestown Geometry series, Belfiglio has honed her vision still further. The point-counterpoint play between solid, detailed volumes and shadows (equally solid in appearance) that characterized her architectural paintings was still very much present. While the imagery remained representational, a more refined sort of ‘abstraction’ was emerging in the sense that her compositions were becoming more distilled. These were intriguing articulations of light-drenched patterns, as in Jamestown Geometry IV, exuding a soft, lyrical quality. That softness and lyricism is in large part intrinsic to the pastel medium, which lends itself well to laying in subtle color areas by overlapping short, mincing strokes. Additionally, her exacting technique brought a refreshing, visually textured surface interest to her images.

The artist continued to combine and streamline these elements through her Potomac Pattern series, as in her elegant Potomac Patterns I. Physical architecture was still a focus in the following Mount Vernon Memories series, as we see in the sure-handed simplicity of Mount Vernon Memories III. But a shift in focus – a reversal, really – was taking shape. By 2010, eschewing hard-edged architectural motifs, the predominant formal content of her images had fully evolved into up-front floral themes, with a gently reminiscent nod to Georgia O’Keefe’s stylized abstractions of lush blooms. So the more recent works we see here are a graceful maturing of Belfiglio’s overall aesthetic concerns.

Indeed, the pure, mesmerizing synthesis of form and light has been the heart of this artist’s creative pursuits all along. In a statement from her exhibit at Canton’s McKinley Museum in 2001, she had written, “I was educated in a professional art world that has been characterized by its shock value, biting social commentary, and ‘in-your-face’ commercial images. In contrast to that world in which I was raised, I am simply endeavoring to create in my art a respite for weary souls.” Ten years later, that statement still speaks of her consistent vision and aesthetic standards, and resonates deeply in this splintered culture so often drawn to ugly sensationalism and collective angst.

Belfiglio’s floral drawings – with their astonishingly luminous colors and wondrous detail – are elegant constructions of serene jubilance. And to this body of work the artist has brought an increased compositional elegance. In several of the drawings, such as Sunlight on Scarlet and Daffodil Diagonals III, she employs a diagonal thrust to great effect, investing them with a sense of quiet drama. You could regard them as you would concerto orchestrations. Think of the luscious blooms as joyous solos, soaring above, but in exquisite harmony with, the richly supportive shadows.

The underlying spirit of bon homie in these drawings is a compelling and unabashedly beautiful witnessing of light, at once fleeting and imperishable, amid our postmodernist milieu of noisy, dark pluralism. As such, they are persistent, radiant acts of courage.

Photo, courtesy Diane Belfiglio: “Transfixed by Tulips III,” oil pastel. On view through June 26 in Studio M at the Massillon Museum, 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon. Museum hours are Tuesday – Saturday 9:30a.m to 5p.m., Sunday 2 – 5p.m. It’s a good idea to call ahead, (330) 833 – 4061, and confirm your visiting time, as sometimes administrative meetings are scheduled for the gallery space.

Much Ado at Malone, part 2: Tactile Dialogue and Rarefied Earth

2011-05-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

Much Ado at Malone, part 2: Tactile Dialogue and Rarefied Earth
By Tom Wachunas

What I’ve always enjoyed about Clare Adams’ fabrications (assemblages of painted or dyed fabric, found objects, often in tandem with encaustic) was their capacity to make me feel as if eavesdropping on an elegant soliloquy about her private life – intriguingly layered glances at her physical and spiritual worlds. Her current works in the McFadden Gallery at the Malone University Johnson Center make up one half of a collaborative project with fabric artist Rebecca Cross, who has worked extensively with dyed silks.

So the soliloquy has become a full dialogue. Adams established the parameters of this collaboration in November, 2009, by making a 15” x 15’’ piece and sending it to Cross, who in turn responded my making a same-size work and sending it on to Adams. And so it went on monthly, for one year, each artist making a work prompted and inspired by the other’s, in this show called “A Visual Correspondence,” on view through most of August.

The result is a delightful collection of 24 pieces that you could call, on one level, conceptual patches of a virtual quilt. Each ‘patch,’ though, functions as a finished fiber or mixed media visual meditation in itself. Some are more pictorial than others in the sense of being loosely composed of various symbols, shapes, and markings – snippets of recognizable reality, particularly in the works by Adams. Others have a more ephemeral presence – not abstract “scenes” so much as they’re gossamer-like, sumptuous constructions of colored textures. What adds a notably fascinating aspect to the collection is the subtle formal progression that takes place from one piece to the next. View them in order, as you would read the pages of a story, and savor how a compositional, material, and/ or color element in one becomes a presence in the next.

In the nearby Fountain Gallery is “Landscape Revisited,” seven sleek images by Scott Zaher. For several years I’ve watched many artists venture into the realm of photoshop and related digital tools to generate their pictures. Too many times the resulting work has a gratuitous, gee-whiz-look-at-my-new-toy glitz. All smoke and mirrors, no real magic.

Zaher calls his pieces “images re-interpreted digitally from conventional/traditional painting techniques.” But they have a vision both truly hypnotic and, and for all their intimate scale, considerably expansive. While all the pictures have a uniformly satin patina, the lush, soft color fields, sometimes gently intersected by the wispiest of lines, nonetheless have a painterly quality.

These aren’t realistic/naturalistic landscapes. Rather, they’re empyreal essences, purified suggestions. A line of trees, or tall grass, is a ghostly brush stroke of translucent green, for example. The perimeters of the images are where several planes of color seem to converge just slightly out of register and become a floating blur of thin, overlapping edges. In these “zones” are glimpses of other underlying colors – relatively tiny specks of warm intensity – that bring a beautifully understated, almost shimmering depth. Now, THAT’s magic.

Photo: “Landscape_4.5.11” by Scott Zaher, on view through September 13 in the Fountain Gallery at Malone University Johnson Center for Worship and the Fine Arts, 2600 Cleveland Avenue NW, Canton. Gallery hours are 9-5 Monday through Friday.

Much Ado at Malone, part 1: Welcome To Huggett World

2011-05-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

Much Ado at Malone, part 1: Welcome To Huggett World
By Tom Wachunas

Judi Krew’s blog post on May 13 is a rightful and welcome praise of the work by R.M. Huggett currently hanging at Malone University’s Johnson Center. She speaks of his impeccable craft, his humor, and his color sensibility, which I agree is deceivingly simple at first blush, but in actuality quite astonishing in its subtle depth. She also mentions Huggett’s relative newness on the local exhibition scene, and predicts that he’ll be someone to watch more closely as time goes on. Again, I agree. So I encourage you to go to www.snarkyart.blogspot.com and read her take on the work. It’s good to see him getting thoughtful attention.

Since first commenting on his painting in the Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery (see my post from May 4, as well as on his work in “Blind Date” at Anderson Creative, posted May 11), Huggett’s work has become increasingly visible as we move into summer, and it continues to call me - with all the toothy (and toothless) glee of his painted kids - to impart just a few more thoughts.

When I referred to Huggett’s work recently as “goofy” and “Nouveau Kitsch,” I certainly did not mean to pigeonhole it as too derivative, low-brow, or commonplace. The work is indeed remarkably sophisticated, and highly successful in accomplishing the artist’s stated intent (posted with his 50 works on display) to make painted surfaces look like printed ones. In that sense, they’re a refreshingly different way to appreciate a “painterly” esthetic. To build the pristine, soft- matte finishes we see here via accumulated layers of brushed-on acrylic inks mixed with gesso, is in itself a masterful achievement. Even the heavy black contour lines of these “cartoons,” for all their stylized precision, nonetheless have a disarming, jittery individuality that gives these uncluttered compositions a quirky life all their own.

It’s a life – a world, really – that is, while surreal at times, always unapologetically comedic. There’s no attempt at fancy three-dimensional illusionism here – just flat-out, matter-of-fact fun. It’s a world where (as indicated by both pictures and their titles) McDonald’s has become Mallard D’s; Lester C. McKracken IV is the 47th Fez-ident of our United States; Newton’s 7th Law of Physics declares that “any bubble blown up in slow motion will also explode in slow motion”; Cheddar cheese masquerades as Swiss cheese; aliens from outer space have been here along; and a bowl of mashed potatoes has as much iconic resonance as a Warhol soup can.

It’s a simple world, meticulously created with a whimsical logic true to itself, and where innocent absurdities frolic. A world where, if only for the time it takes to view it, we can seriously indulge a hearty laugh.

Photo: “Overachiever II,” by R.M. Huggett, on view at Malone University Johnson Center for Worship and the Fine Arts, in the main level hallway marked VISUAL ARTS DEPT, through August, 2600 Cleveland Ave. NW, Canton. Viewing hours are Monday – Friday 9a.m. to 5p.m.

Thank You Very Mutts, Acme Artists

2011-05-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Thank You Very Mutts, Acme Artists
By Tom Wachunas

“He believes in you only in so far as he knows you; the possibility that you are greater than you seem is disturbing, for friendship is founded on mutuality.” – Henry Miller –

“Guys and Dogs” is the loose theme behind the gathering of eight artists’ work at Acme Artists in downtown Canton. I say ‘loose’ because not all the art is about or by guys, or for that matter dogs. In any event, it’s a delightfully eclectic collection of works with a fair amount of overtly canine content.

Erin Mulligan is in fine form with her four tiny pencil drawings of scraggly mutts, one of them with duck feet. In good company with those is the pleasantly strange “Dog,” a mixed media/ceramic sculpture by Annette Feltes. Like a few of her other objects here, it has the air of a primitive talisman or icon, though certainly more whimsical than darkly mysterious.

Nearby are two small oil panels by Tiffany March, each a scene at historic McSorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan. One of them depicts the tavern from the outside, dogs flanking the entrance like sentries at rest. Both paintings are done in a liquidy sepia tonality, and suggest damaged, old-timey photographs. There’s a similar vintage quality in the two paintings by Ron Copeland – like black and white movie posters with a slight nod to Roy Lichtenstein’s pop iconography. And the two small oils by Marti Jones Dixon are studies in elegant spontaneity. “Queen Mum” features Her Majesty taking her beloved Corgis for a walk, while in “Doggy Style,” a bespectacled café patron scowls as his Pomeranean sits pertly atop his table.

Also included in the show is a display of Holly “Buffy” Atkinson’s unique and arresting greeting cards, as well as a very fine collection of ceramic vessels by Bill Shearow. His ovoid bottles taper into long, thin necks that flare out at the top into graceful openings. The raku glazing is stunning, with a crackled effect not on top of, but embedded within, the smooth matte finish. One of the bottles, “Titus,” features a charming rendering of a Labrador’s (?) head worked into the crackling.

The Henry Miller quote at the beginning of this post is hand-written on the wall below a portrait of an old man and his small dog, called “Raindogs at Home,” by Dylan Atkinson. The quote points in a poetic way to the dominant sensibility behind his several oil paintings here on one of the gallery’s main walls, as well as to the works by Joseph Close on the opposite wall: dogs and the homeless, presented either together or separately.

“Raindogs” is a recurring term in Atkinson’s titles, and taken from a 1985 Tom Waits album that was part of a trilogy of recordings addressing what he had called “the urban dispossessed.” Atkinson’s technique is particularly well suited in capturing the somber essence of a marginalized population and its raw, lonely life, as in “Loyalty of a Raindog,” showing a man curled up, sleeping on a sidewalk, his vigilant dog keeping watch. The paintings are largely monotoned and loosely drawn, with the paint applied very thinly. You might think they’re at the early stages of underpainting, or works in progress. And in a way they are. What makes these images so oddly, hauntingly resonant is their sense of simultaneously materializing before our eyes and yet fading away. Street ghosts.

It’s a different but equally expressive esthetic at work in Joseph Close’s pieces. There’s color, but it’s usually very brooding and earthy. Similar too is the spirit of street-weary, urban stress, right down to the found wood frames, old furniture fragments, and metal bric-a-brac that he so often uses as painting surfaces and/or adornments. “Earthly Possessions” is eerily jubilant - even regal - in its presentation of a man, dog in lap, seated upon a makeshift throne. More desperate and forlorn is “Ghost Dog Odin,” a sad-eyed, haggard canine that seems to rise from the mists of a sign reading, “Will Wurk 4 Food .com.”

See these works soon, paws and reflect (forgive the corny pun) before the show ends, though when that may be at Acme Artists is often an indeterminate thing. I get the sense that exhibits here don’t always have formal closing dates so much as they simply evolve, quietly or otherwise, into the next show. It’s one of the qualities that make this space so refreshingly…other.

Photo: “Earthly Possessions” by Joseph Close, courtesy cantonrep.com On View at Acme Artists, 332 Fourth Street NW, downtown Canton. Viewing hours Tuesday – Thursday 11 to 5, call ahead to confirm Saturday and other hours, (330) 452 – 2263. www.acmeartists.com

Striking Matches: Writing Images, Seeing Words

2011-05-11T08:07:00.001-07:00

Striking Matches: Writing Images, Seeing Words

By Tom Wachunas

Sometime in high school I saw a picture of Rene Magritte’s 1929 oil painting, “The Treachery (Perfidy) of Images.” Beneath a realistic rendering of a pipe (for smoking) are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” - translated from French, “This is not a pipe.” And of course, one of several points that Magritte made (all challenging our trust of labels and language) was that the painting is no more a pipe than the Mona Lisa is a woman.

Seeing and thinking about the painting was something of an epiphany, as it increased my sensitivity to the tentative, delicate relationship between images and the words we assign to, or associate with them. In my case, that sensitivity has taken on a protracted life of its own – writing about visual art. Not only describing, but ascribing meaning to pictures with words. And the reverse has often been true, too – making images in response to written words. Looking back, I’ve often thought Magritte’s painting could just as well have been called “The Treachery of Words.” It would have been just as meaningful. It all comes down to the fascinating, mysterious, even confounding thing we call the creative process – how one expression of symbols gives rise to our response via another form of expression.

It’s the subtle symbiosis between the written word and visual forms that is the heart of the current exhibit at Anderson Creative, called “Blind Date.” The show is a “resurrection” of last year’s bold “Blind Date: The Romance of Word and Image.” So, think of symbiosis here as romance – as in a mutual wooing of sorts, a call and response between parties who, in this case, never met until the opening of the show. Fifteen writers and 15 visual artists anonymously exchanged works, each writer getting a visual work, each artist a written work. Then each participant responded with a new piece.

And there’s another kind of wooing going on here, too. That would be, in case you missed last year’s edition, the renewed invitation to consider the “gallery experience” in a more expansive, perhaps challenging light. It’s an invitation to carve out the time needed to “read” the fine visual art as well as “see” the equally fine literature. Here, one feeds the other in a deeply imaginative, poetic way, without succumbing too much to mere illustration of the obvious.

Speaking of poetic, along with narratives of varying lengths, the considerable number of poems here are particularly fascinating with their matched art. Paul Digby wrote the originating text (poem) called “Dualities” that accompanies the acrylic painting by R.M. Hugget, titled after the poem’s last line, “We Forget and Move On.” The poem’s lyrical symbolism around an owl and mouse in a barn becomes a slick, graffiti-like cartoon in Huggett’s sure hands, with one toothy figure asking another, “Did I tell ya the one about the mouse, the barn, and the owl?” His companion responds, “My shirt needs a haircut.” And we move on.

Van Misheff’s “Style” is a poem in response to Judi Krew’s watercolor, “S.T.Y.L.E. (Say They, You R Limited 2 1 Expression).” The painting suggests a stained glass window depicting a naked, shackled woman, clutching paint brushes in one hand, her face covered with a wire cage. A prisoner in/of the luminous color? Misheff’s upbeat poem picks up on the rhythmic pulsing of Krew’s color planes, and reads like a jazz rap with a touch of free-form 1950s hip.

Gennae Falconer wrote her moving “Let Me Have Another Day” in response to Kyle Begue’s stunning, viciously energetic mixed media painting on glass called “Otis Redding” (the beloved soul singer who died in 1967 when his plane crashed in a Wisconsin lake). The collaboration is one of the show’s more viscerally haunting moments.

Haunting too is the originating text by Judi Christy, “Empty Nest.” The somber narrative describes, in beautifully measured sentences, the parting of ways between mother and daughter. Anne Welder’s responsive oil painting effectively translates the spirit of the text with a no-nonsense, earthy immediacy.

A similar appropriateness of spirit is at work in the match between painter Ines Kramer and poet Tim Belden. In many ways it reflects the overarching, ephemeral chemistry of creative collaboration and interpretation that fuels this show. Kramer’s painting, “Sedan,” is a smooth, surreal cityscape of gently skewed perspectives. Traveling through a dream. Belden’s responsive poem, “Street Meditations,” is itself a journey: “…The Desk is a Sedan / I watch headlights on streets / follow arrows pointing in all / directions, cueing me to drive / right or left on bearings in this / dance we do…”

Like any blind dates seeking mutually satisfying connections, the diverse pairings in this “Blind Date” have indeed resulted in many delightful, compelling dances, so to speak. While it’s taken out of context here, I’m nonetheless drawn to a line in Jessica Bennett’s achingly eloquent poem in the show, “Yearn,” reminding me that here are artists and writers who have thoughtfully surrendered to “…a purposeful, quenching muse.”

Photo, courtesy Anderson Creative: “Sedan,” mixed media by Ines Kramer. On view in “Blind Date” at Anderson Creative THROUGH MAY 28, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton. Gallery Hours 12 noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday – Saturday.

Scriptly Speaking

2011-05-08T04:36:00.000-07:00

Scriptly Speaking

By Tom Wachunas

For this, the fifth annual From Script To You New Works Festival presented by the North Canton Playhouse in its intimate McManaway Studio theater, producing artistic director Jeremy Lewis and his team received 246 script submissions (short, one-act plays) from around the country. Six very well crafted entries were selected to make either their Ohio or world premieres. Collectively, the content of this year’s festival is conceptually brighter than in the past. There’s less stormy, existential angst afoot. This is not to say that its many comedic moments aren’t generously balanced with thoughtful, engaging drama.

If there’s a relatively ‘lightweight’ entry in the group, it’s certainly the first play – “Perfect Strangers,” written by Peter Snoad from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and directed here by Moriah Ophardt. While resting after his mountain climb, Robert meets a chatty woman named Betsy who’s been spying on him. She reveals a grave, cathartic secret about herself which has imbued her life with an urgent mission, and she invites Robert, her “perfect stranger,” to participate in it. Tawny Burkhardt is infectiously charming as the nosy, insistent Betsy, while Chris Sailing, as Robert, is cautious (understandably so, given Betsy’s disarmingly invasive demeanor), yet still a bit too emotionally stiff and pre-occupied. Maybe he’s put off by what he thinks is Betsy’s hubris. But he seems to have a cathartic enough moment of his own in the last seconds of this feel-good thirteen minutes.

“Clown Therapy,” written by Nina Mansfield of Greenwich, Connecticut, and directed by Cassey Martin, starts funny and ends funnier still. Maggie and Frank, married, are in session with a marriage counselor. They’re careful to point out that their last name isn’t Bozo, but something like Boh-show. David Burkhardt, playing Frank, arrives for the session in full clown regalia, belying the fact that, according to sultry Maggie’s weepy complaint, he’s simply not at all the clown she married. Meanwhile, Christina Trompower, playing the therapist, treats this farcical romp with clinical but sincere objectivity. Stacey Essex is hilarious as the passionately ditzy Maggie who’s mortified to find that Frank’s red nose is fake, and Burkhardt is equally memorable – a wounded, defensive Bozo - in his exasperated wishes for her to know the real him.

Jeremy Lewis directed the evening’s longest (35 minutes) and surely most riveting entry – “Museum Piece,” written by William Fowkes from New York City. The three-man-monologue is a gem of clever drama interwoven with biting comedy. Each delivers his take on visiting the Museum of Modern Art with increasing intensity until they literally and heatedly cross words and paths while gazing at a confounding contemporary installation. Zach Blake is utterly convincing as a pathologically panicky, agoraphobic student type, fretting over his every thought and move. So too, the masterful Nate Ross is gripping in his character that seethes with confrontational, brooding indignation, both righteous and misplaced. And Michael Burkhardt (he’s real- life father to previously mentioned cast members David, and husband to Tawny) is unforgettably if not oddly endearing in his frenetic portrait of insecure, effete intellectualism.

Cassey Martin directed the comically twisted “Smoke Screen” by Jamaica, New York playwright Esta Fischer. Stacey Essex returns as Laura, girlfriend to Jeff, played by Paul Weston. In celebrating their six-month anniversary of quitting smoking together, they quickly come to sparring through a tight and laugh-filled scenario of second guessing each other’s motives. Even more absurd, though with its own share of authentic social commentary, is “Breeders,” written by Kevin Aremento from Long Island, New York, and directed by Moriah Ophardt. She also deliciously/viciously nails her role as a puppy on a smoke break in front of a pet store, while confronting Flora, an anti-puppy- mill activist, played with high-energy sincerity by Krystian Bender.

In the final work, Jeremy Lewis directed, and plays the role of Greg, along with co-director Cassey Martin in the role of Hailey, in “Three Hour Difference,” by Mike Poblete from New York City. It’s an intriguing, fast-paced look at a long distance relationship. He’s in New York, she in Los Angeles, each speaking to an unseen ‘other’ as they test the waters of separation while questioning their future. Lewis is sharp in his easy delivery of nervousness posing as witty confidence, in subtle counterpoint to Martin’s tender wrestling with her conflicts.

While the 12-minute story leaves the final status of the couple unresolved, it is nonetheless a poignant close to a marvelously satisfying evening of inventive theatre.

Photo, courtesy Alyssa Pearson and Jeremy Lewis: Jeremy Lewis and Cassey Martin in “Three Hour Difference,” one of six short plays in the From Script To You New Works Festival, at the North Canton Playhouse McManaway Studio theater, 525 7th Street NE (Hoover High School), North Canton. THROUGH MAY 14. Shows at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, also 8 p.m Thursday May 12, and 2:30 matinee on Mothers Day, May 8. Seating limited. Tickets (330) 494 – 1613, General Admission $10, students 2 for 1 with valid ID.

Deja vu, S'il Vous Plait?

2011-05-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

Déjà vu, S’il Vous Plait?

By Tom Wachunas

“Competitions are for horses, not artists.” – Bela Bartok –

“Art is the increasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” – Marc Chagall –

“So let’s leave it alone ‘cause we can’t see eye to eye. There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.”
- lyrics by Dave Mason, 1977 –

Once upon a time, in 1863, some four thousand artists raised a mighty stink about being rejected by the prestigious Paris Salon. To quell the scandal (one does not raise the ire of that many artists without serious repercussions), French Emperor Napolean III stepped in and spearheaded an alternative show that has since been known as the “Salon des Refuses.” Take that, you snooty intellectual types. Still, I’m sure that many Salon diehards dismissed the exhibit under their haughty breaths as “The Losers Show.” But it did bring to the fore such artists as Edouard Manet, who would consequently come to be regarded as the progenitor of Impressionism.

This is not to say that what we see in juried art shows these days, including the 69th Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton, is determined strictly by pompous or conservative academics, though some certainly are, no matter where they’re mounted. Nor am I suggesting that somewhere in the mix of works not chosen for the May Show are a few artists whose work might someday rock the art world with mind- boggling originality. In fact we’ll never know what we’re missing, unless…Where’s Napolean III when we really need him? (Note to self: find someone to stir up the also-rans?)

Seriously, though, on one level it’s hard to find substantial fault with the overall look of this show, and for that we can once again thank curator Elizabeth Blakemore for making the best out of what the jurors (Gail Rule-Hoffman and Sr. Rosaria Perna, both from Ursuline College) selected. Befitting the sharply polished look of the space, the show is a real stunner, that is if you’re biased toward representational art, be it faithfully naturalistic or with more expressive leanings. In the vein of Old Masters technique, Frank Dale’s “Sarah,” and Kristine Wyler’s “Through the Mist” are both absolutely breathtaking. And Deborah Woloschuk’s still life, “Vintage Iridescence,” is a dazzling feast of luminous textures. There are numerous other representational paintings, collages, and drawings – landscapes, still lifes, portraits - in varying degrees of skill and originality. What they share collectively in this context is a pristine preciousness that gives the show the aura of a haute design boutique. Safe, tried-and-true, and always pretty.

This is all fine and good as far as it goes. But as in too many local juried shows of the past, I miss the stuff I’ve occasionally seen fly just below our provincial radar. To be sure, there are some works in this show that do, very effectively, probe subtler things than visible reality. Just not enough of them. Whether or not this is a matter of jurors’ bias, or lack of depth in total entries for the show is, unless you poll the curator and jurors, an unknowable variable.

Pure abstraction, for example, is woefully under-represented. In that genre, Christopher J. Triner’s oil painting, “Shaken Not Stirred,” with its clustered, energetic impasto daubs atop a ghostly underpainted structure, is certainly among the most compelling works here. Likewise, “Landscape Revisited,” a digital print by Scott Zaher, while structurally derivative of Richard Diebenkorn’s iconic “Ocean Park” abstractions from the 1970s, is intriguing in how it evokes such a large velvety atmosphere on such a small picture plane. Elsewhere, Dr. Fredlee Votaw’s impeccably crafted mixed media “Thinking About the Holocaust” gives new and dramatic meaning to the notion of haunting juxtapositions. Similarly, if there’s such a thing as lyrical minimalism, Robert Gallik’s small sculpture of caged stones on a tray of sand, “River Piece #5,” fills the bill quite beautifully.

The inclusion of Richard M. Huggett’s crisp acrylic “HaveYou Been Eating Tacos?” is curiously jarring in this context. Maybe the jurors saw it as a happy medium between accessible and edgy. As it is, this goofy, Nouveau Kitsch cartoon has a Warholian slickness about it. It’s an irreverent though gentle slap to this show’s prim and proper face, and as such, oddly refreshing.

Photo: Detail of “Thinking About the Holocaust,” mixed media by Dr. Fredlee Votaw. On view in the 69th Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, through May 31. (330) 499 – 4712, Ext. 312
gallery@northcantonlibrary.org

From Across The Pond, Fury and Finesse

2011-05-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

From Across The Pond, Fury and Finesse

By Tom Wachunas

A first time visitor to Umstattd Hall might have thought that this season-closing concert on April 30 by the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO) was an intentional addendum to the pomp and circumstance of the Royal Wedding that had transpired in London the day before (even though, of course, the program was determined far in advance of the wedding’s announcement). But more on that a bit later. The theme of the concert was “The Splendor of England,” featuring works, all of them splendid to be sure, by Handel, Elgar, Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Even the first work on the program – Handel’s brief but electrifying coronation anthem, “Zadok the Priest” – was certainly in keeping with all things royal, and thunderously so.

After the orchestra’s lush, quietly measured introduction, the combined choirs of the Canton Symphony Chorus, Kent State University Chorus, and Canton’s delightfully gifted VOCI, exploded with such a sharply pronounced, sonorous entrance that I noticed many wide-eyed audience members appearing to physically bounce upward in their seats. From there, orchestra and choirs embarked on an inspired and unified declaration of sheer jubilance, as if to say, “now that we have your attention.”

A resonant euphoria still seemed present in the air as Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann addressed the audience before the program’s second work, Edward Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings.” After stating his fond admiration for the beauty of British string music, with impish aplomb he related how some individuals had shared with him their perplexity over the timing of this concert, coming as it did right after the royal nuptials. Leaving the question to dangle unanswered, he abruptly turned his back to the audience to begin conducting. And just before the laughter subsided, he faced us again with a quick afterthought, saying, “It’s because I’m Facebook friends with the Queen.” Then, not losing a beat as it were, it was on to the Elgar.

It’s fair to point out that dedicated followers of the CSO have come to expect, as ‘de rigueur,’ eminently balanced, crisp, and emotionally engaging performances. In short, to deliver great works with great sensitivity. And once again, that is precisely what these remarkable musicians accomplished with Elgar’s iconic work. Interestingly enough, he composed it as a gift for his wife, Alice, on the occasion of their third wedding anniversary. Here, particularly in the achingly soulful Larghetto movement, with its richly tender and delicate textures, the orchestra was the embodiment of intense lyricism.

That lyrical intensity was all the more magnified and visceral in the remaining two works on the program. Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes were combined by the composer as a single work from his 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, the tragic tale of an outcast fisherman searching for redemption. In this astonishing performance, the orchestra wove a virtual tapestry of moods and textures of the sea, beginning with the tranquility of ‘Dawn’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ in the first two movements, followed by the eerie, atmospheric ‘Moonlight,’ and climaxing with the relentlessly startling, furious ‘Storm.’ Throughout, the orchestra’s full array of instruments came into play with powerful imagination and virtuosity.

Finally, as if to answer the emotionality of all that tumultuous orchestral roaring, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace)” brought another kind of fury and angst to our already stunned attention. This was Williams’ searing plea for peace in the looming shadow of World War II. The combined choirs returned, singing with a gripping fervor and urgency. So too the guest artists, soprano Emily Albrink and baritone Brian Keith Johnson. Their impeccable artistry brought to the fore, with deeply moving clarity, the work’s bittersweet prayerfulness, eventually rising to a thunderous, hopeful song of ‘Glory to God’ at the end, which faded into Albrink’s sweetly plaintive, quiet and lingering “dona nobis pacem.” For all of its quietude, this finale was a resounding Amen to a very memorable CSO season.

Symphony On Canvas

2011-04-30T07:57:00.001-07:00

Symphony On Canvas

By Tom Wachunas

Synesthesia is a sensory phenomenon wherein the stimulation of one sense can trigger the awakening of another. I can’t tell you, for example, how many times the odor of a roasting turkey has made me able to clearly see every tiny detail of the Thanksgiving table my mother set during my childhood, right down to the antique floral design of her finest china, the lacy embroidery of linen napkins and table cloth, the finely embossed golden rims of the crystal glasses. Similarly, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced the phenomenon more immediately and acutely than when I first walked through the current exhibit in the Massillon Museum’s main gallery.

Long before I read the wall placard addressing the theme of the show, called “Color in Freedom: Journey Along the Underground Railroad,” the 30 vibrant, luscious acrylic and mixed media paintings by Joseph Holston elicited an instantaneous, astonishing sensation of hearing monumentally symphonic music. So it was particularly gratifying to read that Holston composed this chronicle of slavery from bondage to freedom in the form of four distinct movements, as in a symphony: Unknown World, Living in Bondage – Life on the Plantation, Journey of Escape, and Color in Freedom. To appreciate Holston’s artistic logic and dramatic impact of the paintings’ ordered sequence, on entering the gallery, begin your journey in the nearby right corner.

As a painter, Holston’s strengths are many and formidable, starting with the streamlined fluidity in how he has rendered (as in drawn) his figures. Nothing seems wasted in his expressive brushwork. Whether working in wide, sweeping flourishes, or in smaller clusters of energized strokes, all of it projects an intense, purposeful urgency – progressively more so as the paintings enter the later phases of the third, and then throughout the fourth movement of the sequence. Eschewing any identifying features in his figures’ faces (or, for that matter, other superficial details of dress or anatomy), Holston has focused on their animated postures, their varied and subtle attitudes of movement, and their interlocking forms. Combined with the deliciously liberal, physical presence of the paint itself, and the sheer largeness of picture plane composition, these figures of slaves, even at their most anguished and tortured, inhabit the paintings like heroic spirits, as if they were sculptures carved from the ethereal stuff of pathos, dignity, and ultimately pure exuberance.

It’s Holston as colorist, though, who wields an uncanny ability to conjure palpable musicality. And he does so by employing the effects of the most rudimentary of color dynamics – breathtaking contrasts of cool and hot, and complementary hues in elegant balance. In “Dawn of Despair,” from the Living in Bondage movement, three huddled figures occupy well more than half of the picture, hunched over in a monochromatic mass of deep blues and grays, their black hands like so many dead weights, unable to lift themselves into the amorphous arc of fiery orange above them. In the first two sequences of this symphony of canvases, Holston’s dominant, dark monotones evoke the sounds of eerily foreboding, tumultuous strings and rumbling timpani. But always there’s a smaller, warm glowing, like the soundings of distant brass and winds, signaling a hope, a promise, a destination. In the third movement, those warm accents become more hot, expansive, and insistent, as in the poignant procession under and toward the blazing sun of “After Harriet.” Then, in the triumphant fourth, the once murky, weighted figures are softer and infused with airy, vibrant life. The long, treacherous night has ended. Their earthbound oppression has given way to the explosive ebullience of lighter, brighter colors - indeed songs - of unshackled joy.

This exhibition of works by a single artist surely ranks as the most electrifying to grace the walls of the Massillon Museum in recent memory. Holston’s vision is an unforgettably passionate and reverential one. And in chronicling the human drama of one of history’s most important and compelling passages, he has managed to awaken and inspire all our senses.

Photo, courtesy cantonrep.com: “Dawn of Despair,” by Joseph Holston. On view at the Massillon Museum, 121 Lincoln Way E., downtown Massillon. Viewing hours are Tuesday – Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Information at www.massillonmuseum.org or call (330) 833 – 4061.

Pitching Pitchy Siren Songs

2011-04-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

Pitching Pitchy Siren Songs

By Tom Wachunas

I’ve always had a soft spot in this often curmudgeonly heart-o-mine for artists who know full well their ability to push people’s buttons. To stir up the pot of our predispositions about what’s beautiful, inspiring, or empowering. To intentionally walk along precarious esthetic edges while brandishing arguments and attitudes guaranteed to trigger lively if not heated discourse. Whether you call it courage or insouciant self-indulgence on their part, such artists will continue to make works we love to hate, hate to love, or long to like. Somewhere in this mix there’s painter Megan Mars.

Since first encountering her work around five years ago, I’ve watched her, with admittedly marginal interest, solidify her niche in our local arts community to the point of brand-name recognition. All along the way, I’ve wondered how or if she could successfully expand that niche, or maybe even transcend it altogether. And by that I don’t mean increasing the degree of her exposure or viewer base, but rather deepening the ideological and technical content of her paintings per se.

Based on the works currently exhibited in her salon-style show called “She’s a Monster” at Thirteenth Floor Gallery in Massillon, Mars appears to be still safely ensconced in her comfort zone, perhaps content that if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it – at least not overly much. Her signature iconography is for the most part intact (and of its kind, compelling enough) – buxom, often robustly beautiful women presented as alluring or scary embodiments of feminine power and self-assuredness, along with a healthy dose of woundedness and vulnerability. They’re theatrical in the sense that one puts on an elaborately decorated persona and lives it out in a strange fantasy world. Some of these women of Mars, so to speak, look like naughty vixens from planet Bizarro, others like Medusa’s extended family. Still others exude a raw sort of elegance. Most of the pictures don’t come off as portraits of real people who breathe or speak warmly into our lives, but rather as codified symbols of roles, situations, identities, or desires. But even at their most gothic or grotesque, there are some signs, in varying degrees, of genuinely palpable emotions lurking beneath the trappings of kinky eroticism and murky pallor of death common to many of the images.

I think there’s true Romanticism in Mars’ work. But it’s more latent than fully blossomed. This has as much to do with her choices as a painter as with her pictorial content. At this point, she seems to be replicating a tight formula for presenting an ‘everywoman’ sensuality and immediacy, but without the sensuality and immediacy of paint itself. To be fair, she has developed an increasingly refined fluidity in the touch of her brush. Yet I’m fairly certain her sensationalistic imagery could take on all the more visceral impact – and emotional resonance - if she were to loosen up and let paint be paint. Why not employ the tactile physicality of painted surface as metaphorical ‘soul’ of the work? Experimenting with a more daring, varied palette wouldn’t hurt, either.

In viewing Mars’ work these past several years, here’s a cautionary note, offered out of my abiding respect for her clear ability in drawing and her authentic passion for making art. The process of artistic maturing has everything to do with listening intently to what an idea is saying - of letting the idea tell how it wants to be manifest, instead of habitually forcing it into a predetermined schematization. It’s highly plausible, given the sense of implied personal narrative in these works, that the ideas driving them are better suited to be, for example, illustrations in what could be an electrifying graphic novel. In any event, and for any artist, it’s also worth remembering that some ideas simply don’t wear paint all that easily, or well.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens, daughters of a sea god, were beautiful women who, with their seductive singing, lured sailors to fatally veer off course. Here’s hoping that as her artistic journey progresses, Megan Mars doesn’t let the song she’s been hearing thus far lead her, as a painter, any closer to dangerously shallow waters.

Photo, courtesy cantonrep.com: “Octavia” by Megan Mars, on view through May 19 in “She’s a Monster,” at Thirteenth Floor Gallery, 28 Charles Ave. SE, downtown Massillon. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 12 noon to 6 p.m.

Thoughtscapes

2011-04-26T10:49:00.001-07:00

Thoughtscapes

By Tom Wachunas

The current exhibit at the Kent State University at Stark Main Hall Gallery is not one that will stop you in your tracks as you shuffle by and look through the big glass wall. Eye-popping colors and other visual grandiosities do not beckon from afar. This is not a show that will stand up well to a quick, over-the-shoulder glance, which is too often the typical viewing mode of too many people.

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of inviting visual intrigue in this group show, called “New World: Places + Form,” provided you allow sufficient time to see its unique balance of concept with physical substance. The works by the four guest artists in this show – Kate Budd, Beth Lindenberger, Matthew Kolodzie, and Donna Webb – make for a visually pristine, quietly cerebral atmosphere.

Both Budd and Lindenberger are clearly fascinated with the organic forms suggested by certain animals, vegetables, flower buds, seedpods, or shells. Their pieces – small enough to fit in your hand – are spread out on two long tables covered with white cloth. Like laboratory specimens. Lindenberger’s glazed ceramic works are in large part more naturalistic and tactile – though sometimes playful - homages to the forms that inspired them. Budd, on the other hand, brings a heightened sense of psychological wonder to her forms molded in wax. Several of them are translucent, and embellished with tiny glass beads, protruding pins, or perforated with evenly-spaced holes. Some suggest small vegetables or pods that have been cleanly sliced on one end. They exude a distinctly charming sense of mystery, hinting at human interactions or interventions - like enchanted, sensual forest ingredients carefully prepared for a secret ritual.

Kolodzie’s 22” x 30” gouache wash drawings on paper, titled “Out of Sync” (numbered 1 through 5), are each alternately dense and airy configurations of overlapped, graffiti-like markings in flux. Within these clusters of scribbly dashes, lines, and curves are rhythms in one color that shadow and echo rhythms in another, vibrating in a tentative dance between zones of apparent chaos and fields of more controlled spontaneity. Call them topographies of structured intuition. They’re nervous and even astringent at times, yet strangely confident and seductive. Mesmerizing maps of a sort, they vaguely describe landscapes both urban and rural, simultaneously dispersing and congealing.

And speaking of dispersed landscapes, there’s “The Boogie Man of Howard Street: a place to be blue” by Donna Webb. The central panel in this installation that spans the main wall of the gallery is a mosaic of ceramic tiles, and a study for a public work commemorating Akron’s Howard Street entertainment district. From the right side of the image, a loosely rendered figure in brown, arms stretched as in flight (or reaching to touch land?), floats above intersecting streets. In her accompanying statement, Webb tells us that during the 1940’s and 50s, the district was the night-life hub of the African American community, with clubs offering the music of jazz and blues greats of the day. Declaring the area “blighted” in the 1960s, the city razed it in the name of urban renewal.

To the left of the panel is a round, ridged ceramic ‘platter’ – a shiny blue sun, as it were – surrounded by a variety of smaller ‘orbiting’ discs that also extend to the right of the panel. The work doesn’t so much read as an angry indictment of relentless urban development as it is a sensitive remembrance of a bygone era. On another level, this symbolic microcosm does bring to mind that, for better or worse, modern cultural identity is no longer a fixed, immutable entity. If there is a “new world” identified here, it’s perhaps one of cultural diaspora. And like the rest of this show, the work invites and deserves our gentle contemplation.

Photo: “Out of Sync #3,” gouache, by Matthew Kolodzie, on view through May 6, Main Hall Gallery, on the campus of Kent State University at Stark. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to noon.

Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

2011-04-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

Risen Indeed: An Easter Meditation

By Tom Wachunas

“And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.” -Revelation 21:5 –

“He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history has opened.” - C.S. Lewis, from “The Joyful Christian” –

On this Good Friday I spent an hour or so browsing dozens of pictures of paintings and sculptures depicting the Resurrection of Christ. What follows is simply an invitation to think on what Easter might mean to you.

Archived within these blog posts are several appreciations of art as a spontaneous response to being alive. The act of making art – what we commonly call ‘creating,’ and the process of it ‘creativity’- is itself but a tarnished reflection of our Divine origins, a remnant spark, a flickering remembrance. I have believed this with all my heart for many years. There is a certain sense of desperation that I sense when considering the whole of human creativity through the arts - a sense of the sacred progressively becoming elusive and worse - irrelevant. As I get older, I notice in our world an increasingly fading and corrupted memory of the primordial creative act described in Genesis. God thought it, and so it became. And it was good. Then, it got wrecked, by our own hand.

On this Easter weekend I’m immersed in gratitude for my own capacity to make art, to consider it, to savor it. To savor art that, at the very least, even if indirectly, affirms what is noble or pure or good about being alive. To participate in the memory of “And God said…” How, then, can we use this capacity, this memory, this participation?

What if, as artists and lovers of the arts, we saw our creativity as a way back to thanking, praising, and worshipping the author of our talents, the source of our capacities, the God who made us in His image? What if we saw ourselves as participating in, instead of resisting, His original plan for us? What then would motivate our creativity? What would our art – indeed our life - look like? What would it inspire? Hope? Joy? All things made new?

Unlike Prometheus, we don’t need to steal light from jealous, stingy, unapproachable gods, and suffer the eternally painful consequences. It’s always been ours for the asking. The image that accompanies this missive is the 1510 Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald. It’s a beautiful, stunning reminder of the hope and victory first promised us in Genesis. And more, consider it a remembrance, on this Easter and beyond, of not just the greatest story ever told, but the greatest promise ever kept.

Who Do We Say We Think He Is?

2011-04-18T08:08:00.001-07:00

Who Do We Say We Think He Is?

By Tom Wachunas

Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” - Matthew 26: 38-39 –

Michael Dempsey, who directed the current production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Players Guild Theatre in Canton, reminds us in his astute program notes that when this Tim Rice (lyrics) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) rock opera collaboration premiered 40 years ago, the notion of a very human, conflicted, secularized Jesus “…chilled the marrow of many believers.” Indeed, on its surface, the show does seem to offer up Jesus Christ as a hapless, misunderstood victim of fate over which he had no say, embroiled in the volatile politics and social perceptions of his backward times. And some might still be flummoxed to know that the story line ends not with the bang of Jesus’ Gospel- acclaimed victory in Resurrection, but with an implied whimper as he steps down from the cross where he died, and walks slowly off into the darkened wings.

Dempsey also correctly points out that the initial outrage and arguments from those early days have progressively waned to the point where many churches find the show’s basic theology suitable for Easter season celebrations, even as productions in the secular world have acquired an increasingly big-budget flamboyance. “It’s a piece of art that lives in two worlds…,” Dempsey notes of this melding of rock with theatre. His goal here was to get back to the basics of the original rock album form while still honoring the show’s theatrical intensity. And in all of that – sound, set, lights, choreography (by Michael Lawrence Akers), and the commanding cast – the evening is supremely successful.

I had forgotten just how brilliantly textured and nuanced the music is for this show, and here it’s presented in rock concert modality, with crystalline intensity, by an 11-piece orchestra on center stage, conducted by pianist Steve Parsons. The multi-level set, designed by Craig Betz, surrounds and rises up behind the orchestra like a crumbling temple conjoined with rocky landscape.

In his superb portrayal of Jesus, Vaughn Schmidt is a marvelous presence, even in the moments when he’s visibly exhausted and overwhelmed by the demands and expectations of the crowds that assail him – both needy and adversarial. It’s a vulnerable Jesus we see in the song “Gethsemane” – desperate for answers in a wrenching, prayerful moment when exasperation and reluctant resolve collide. Schmidt sings with all the urgency and power of a seasoned rocker. His plaintive, high-end sustained notes – piercing howls, really - explode like searing lightning bolts from a storm of deep, churning emotions. It’s that same kind of seasoned emotional electricity that Khaled Tabbara skillfully wields in his role of the brooding Judas. His soaring, throaty vocals bring a visceral pathos to his tortured search to understand and connect with Jesus. In many ways I could almost hear Judas singing the show’s most iconic song, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

But of course that moment is assigned to Mary Magdalene, searching her own soul while gazing at a sleeping Jesus. As Magdalene, Bethany Taylor truly shines, providing a steady, tender light on human longings and conflicted feelings. In another particularly heartrending scene, after Jesus is arrested, she sings the sweetly anguished “Could We Start Again Please?” with Peter, played by Kris North.

Elsewhere in the proceedings, Chuck Simon is riveting as he delivers a startlingly muscular and credible reading of Pilate. Chris Gales is equally startling – both hilarious and scary - as a dandyish Herod, taunting Jesus with his glitzy chorus line harem of hoofers doing the Charleston. John Scavelli and Tom Bryant bring a convincingly chilling and sinister air to their roles of the conniving Annas and Caiaphas, respectively.

In appreciating the artistic impact of this show, it would be like ignoring the proverbial elephant in our living room to dismiss the “religious” questions it raises. I do think the work reflects a long-standing human tendency to pick and choose what we can live with when it comes to accepting history’s most controversial person. We can identify with Judas and Mary Magdelene as presented here because they embody our own struggle to reconcile the earthly with the ethereal. And like them, we might find momentary if not uneasy comfort by re-configuring Jesus into a similarly tormented soul.

Such considerations aside, say what you will about historic Jesus. His last words recorded in the Gospel of Matthew are, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” So whether you call it superstition, speculation, or faith, I’m nonetheless certain that this thrilling theatrical event – like a lot of art made through the ages – is one of many ways he chooses to remain in our midst. Have a Blessed Easter.

Photo by James Dreussi, courtesy cantonrep.com: Khaled Tabbara as Judas (left) and Vaughn Schmidt as Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” on the Players Guild mainstage, in the Cultural Center for the Arts, 1001 Market Ave. N, Canton. Shows are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30p.m. Sundays (except Easter) THROUGH MAY 8. Tickets $22 for adults, $20 for seniors, $17 for students. Order by calling (330) 453 – 7617.