By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: Flemish Pearls: 35 Paintings in the Flemish
Technique, at The Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public
Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, THROUGH JULY 13 http://www.ncantonlibrary.com/?q=little_art_gallery
“These are
pictures with a pulse, drawing us deep below their mirror-smooth surfaces. We
become delightfully lost in their ethereal subtleties…”
That quote is from
a review of painter Frank Dale’s work posted here back in 2009. Here’s a link,
and I respectfully ask you to click and read before proceeding any
further: http://artwach.blogspot.com/2009/08/palpitations.html
And as long as I’m playing the role of
taskmaster, just for good measure, go ahead and read this one from 2011: http://artwach.blogspot.com/2011/04/giving-past-future-in-present.html
One adage that I have
come to understand over many years is this: You’ve got to give it away to keep
it. It’s a philosophical gem that can apply to everything from contentment and
spiritual healing to practical wisdom and knowledge. And it’s in the realm of
knowledge, passed on from a teacher to his students, where this show resonates
in a most edifying way.
Frank Dale’s
aesthetic spirit is passionately immersed in the Flemish painting methodology
and the demands that come with it. Among those are impeccable drawing skills
along with the application of transparent oil paint glazes to produce luminosity so heightened that colors don’t so
much rest atop the painting surface (usually glass-smooth wood panels) as they
seem to breathe underneath it.
This compelling
exhibit includes several of Dale’s works. They offer us stunning evidence of
his utterly empyreal handling of the Flemish technique. He presents the method
quite concisely in the guide book he authored, A Search For Beauty, which is available for purchase directly from
him at dulcipix@ameritech.net or
through gallery curator Elizabeth Blakemore at gallery@northcantonlibrary.org
. The lion’s share of this exhibit, however, belongs to 30 of his students
(he’s been giving private lessons since 2002).
Within that group
there is a considerable range of ages and artistic experience. The same can be
said of pure skill levels. Which is to say that yes, some painters are more
successful than others in the discipline of drawing (what the exhibit juror,
Dino Massaroni, prefers to call “shape control”) and nuanced paint application.
But overall, there’s plenty of evidence here that Dale is an effective teacher.
And what is most wondrously apparent in his students’ portraits, still lifes,
florals and landscapes is the achievement of an ineffable candescence – surely
a magical lustre – so characteristic of the technique.
One of the more
accomplished still lifes is Reflection
by Murli Narayanan (Best In Show). The lavishly detailed textures of wood,
stone, galss and metal are a masterful demonstration of trompe l’oeil
illusionism. Similarly spectacular is Josette Meade’s charming Memories of a Special Night (Third
Place).
Amid the many
traditional subjects addressed in this show are some images that have a
relatively more modernist theme. There’s at once a Baroque and Surrealist
theatricality about Erin Mulligan’s fanciful creatures (part bird, part cat) in
Poetry of Deception (First Place). The Eye of God, by Mary Lange, is
startlingly like a glossy photograph of a feathery stellar cloud or cosmic
explosion, with diaphanous colors that are nothing short of…heavenly.
Though The Bridge, by Gregory Giavasis, is one
of the smallest entries in this collection, the artist manages the picture
plane in an expansive way, with a remarkable sense of variation in textures and
mark-making in his brush work. In some ways the piece is an elegant suggestion
of Monet’s garden paintings, and even more remarkable when considering that
Giavasis is all of nine years old. Talk about precocious youth…
While it was the 15th
century Northern Renaissance masters who perfected and left us an unearthly
gift of their vision and methods, it’s gratifying to know that Frank Dale is
more than a solitary inheritor of an important legacy. Call him a torch bearer,
generously lighting the way for those gifted artists such as we see here. Hopefully
they will continue Dale’s practice of giving that legacy away so we can keep
and cherish it.
PHOTOS, courtesy
Elizabeth Blakemore (from top): Girl with
a Pearl Earing (after Vermeer), by Frank Dale; The Bridge, by Gregory Giavasis; Memories of a Special Night, by Josette Meade; Reflection, by Murli Narayanan; The
Eye of God, by Mary Lange
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