Confabulations Extraordinaire

 

 Confabulations Extraordinaire

Sherri Hornbrook, (left) Honor, (right) Wings

Emily Vigil - Doing Dishes Together: Portrait of Us

Emily Vigil: Skipping Stones

Eleanor Dillon Kuder - Enduring Influence

Eleanor Dillon Kuder - Places She Called Home

Sherri Hornbrook -
 (clockwise from top left) Blossom, Departure, Nest, Pendulum

By Tom Wachunas 

  “Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that is already inside it, but something that happens inside you.” ― Brian Eno

   “Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.”   - Robert Motherwell

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. - Plutarch

 

EXHIBIT: CONVERSATIONS – paintings by Sherri Hornbrook, Eleanor Dillon Kuder, Emily Vigil / The Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery, in the Fine Arts Building at Kent State University at Stark, 6000 FRANK AVENUE NW, NORTH CANTON, OH, THROUGH DECEMBER 9, 2022 / Gallery hours Monday – Friday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

   When it comes to paintings – whether making them, looking at them, or talking about them – I confess I’m an inveterate Romantic with an “unquenchable need.” Like many of us, I look for more than facile faithfulness to the familiar, or something more than skillfully rendered prosaic realism devoid of poetic spirit.

  The most compelling paintings aren’t just mute, decorative wall ornaments. They transcend static, generic images of mundane banalities. Rather, they’re events still forming, conversations still transpiring, or on the verge of commencing.

   Those conversations begin with the painters’ often intuitive methods for responding to their own mark-making - their storytelling, as it were. Such personal narratives are born out of a call-and-response process which evolves in real time across the picture plane.

    On one level, a “finished” painting is a private dialogue between marks and mark-maker. But the dialogue need not end when picture is mounted on wall. It can grow and expand when we viewers become third-party makers by virtue of our practiced, intentional looking. When we allow ourselves ample time to free our own intuitions, we can hear with our eyes. We can interpret messages or meanings as we see fit, or if not, find sublime contentment in savoring the potency of pure mystery. Either way, paintings can in fact speak in our real time if we imagine them first as inhaling our willful gaze, and then exhaling the “words” – indeed the life - of the painter. It is a powerful agency, stunningly present in this spectacular exhibit, bejeweled as it is with 56 works by three remarkable artists: Sherri Hornbrook, Eleanor Dillon Kuder, and Emily Vigil.

   Eleanor Dillon Kuder’s mesmerizing, mixed-media figural pieces are airy and mystical portraits of a kind, aglow with saturated, vibrant color. Recumbent or ascending women (perhaps self-portraits?) float, seemingly immersed in deep meditation, seeking or already embracing beauty at once electrifying and serene.

   There’s also an aura of meditation and spirituality in the soft chromatic translucency of Emily Vigil’s small-scale watercolors. In one series, her grid motifs of gently modulated colors are pixelated, in-the-moment flashes of personal encounters and memories. Additionally, there are equally elegant works from another series of compositions more directly representational in nature, called “Dishes Done.” These still-lifes from the kitchen are intriguing metaphors for intimate domesticity.

   Sherri Hornbrook’s canvases are dense, dazzling adventures. They breathe with both visceral and delicate painterly gestures amidst all manner of complex organic shapes and lines, rich color harmonies and dissonances that dance together, all enmeshed with intricate, pulsing patterns. Dichotomies united: finite with infinite, calm with conflict, light with shadow. The stuff of being alive.

   To Eleanor, Emily, and Sherri, thanks for talking with us. Your eloquence is enlivening.