Vista Botanica
By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: Vista Botanica, at Gallery 6000: works by Carolyn Jacob, Judi Krew,
Eleanor Kuder, Margo Miller and Ron Watson THROUGH OCTOBER 30, 2015 / located
in the CONFERENCE CENTER DINING ROOM at KENT STATE UNIVERSITY AT STARK, 6000
Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio. OPENING
RECEPTION on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 5:30-7:30 P.M.
“Painting from nature is not copying the
object; it is realizing one’s sensations.” -Paul Cezanne
“Paint the essential character of things.” -Camille Pissaro
At the risk of
indulging overly much in shameless self-aggrandizement, I’m telling you right
now that in the roughly seven years that I’ve been curating group exhibitions
at Gallery 6000, I don’t believe I’ve hung a show that fills the space with
more delicious snap, crackle, and pop than this one. The cereal…er, uhm, serial
feel of these botanical or landscape-themed works from five artists sets up an
exhilarating journey through dazzling colors, forms, and textures. Call it a
paean to Nature’s exquisite material structures and ineffable spiritualities.
Toward that end,
my inclusion of Ron Watson’s charcoal drawings may seem an improbable or
counterintuitive one. But I think the
idea he has rendered here speaks to subtler aspects of landscape art than
do the visual components we typically encounter in the genre.
If ever there was a primordial drawing medium,
it’s charcoal – carbonized remnants of trees, essentially. From that
perspective, there’s an intrinsic hauntedness and timeless quietude about
Watson’s drawings. I don’t see these as depictions of foreboding skies or
fields so much as soulful tone poems about contrasts – organic natural
architectures silhouetted in misty atmosphere. And even at their most opaque or
saturated, the velvety blacks still seem to breathe.
Speaking of
breathing in primordial Nature, while weeding through the loamy remnants of my
summer garden recently, I was reminded of Eleanor Kuder’s arresting mixed media
works on paper. Spatial depth in her pictures has for the most part been
compressed into shallow planes dense with literal and abstracted references to
floral life, such as in In The Garden. There’s
a delightful, palpably spontaneous energy in the way Kuder incorporates linear
contours that alternately define her forms and dissolve into animated clusters
of radiant color.
Expressionistic linearity
of a different sort energizes the luscious sylvan character of the large oil
canvases by Margo Miller. Undulate, for
example, effectively lives up to its name with its rhythmic intertwining of
large leafy forms in analogous blues and greens, punctuated by smaller
“undergrowth” markings in complementary hues. All four of Miller’s works here
balance the micro with the macro to evoke a sense of mystical discovery. The
flowing breadth of her tactile brush strokes exudes remarkable gestural
confidence, giving the notion of “forest” a metaphysical dimensionality.
Judi Krew’s acrylic paintings sizzle with
chromatic electricity. I’ve never seen ROY G. BIV so splendidly attired. Krew’s
deft management of a hyperbolic palette, spread across a complex formal
composition with spatial ambiguities, is particularly intriguing in her
spectacular Shadow Play. Reversals of
figure/ground, negative/positive shape dynamics make the shadows of buds and
blossoms appear like so many spritely ghosts dancing amid the cactus forms.
Rounding out this
gathering are the digital photographs by Carolyn Jacob. Her approach is richly
varied, ranging from documentary, as in the beatific Floralique, to the abstract, almost painterly Impression of a Rose. For all their modesty of scale, Jabob’s
images constitute a decidedly enlarged vision of botanical lyricism. As such,
they’re a stunning contribution to an exhibit best seen as an encounter with
pure enchantment.
PHOTOS, from top: In The Garden, by Eleanor Kuder; Floralique, by Carolyn Jacob; Undulate, by Margo Miller; Cattails, by Ron Watson; Shadow Play, by Judi Krew
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