Brio Trio - Delicious Food for Thought

Brio Trio – Delicious Food for Thought 

By Tom Wachunas

  “Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story… The line is the feeling, from a soft thing, a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something ending, something beginning.  – Cy Twombly

  “All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.”  - Marc Chagall 

   “Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.”  - Georges Braque

      

   EXHIBIT: BRIO TRIO – works by Sherri Hornbrook,  Eleanor Dillon Kuder, and Ariana Parry / at GALLERY 6000, Conference Center Dining Room, Kent State University At Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH NOVEMBER 10, 2017

---SAVE THE DATE !! ---- OPENING RECEPTION on Wed., September 27, 5:30 – 7:30 P.M.

PLEASE RSVP to Aleksandar Grahovac:  agrahov1@kent.edu 

   OK so it’s a dining room, not a real art gallery. It’s not the most optimal of environs for serious, concentrated looking at something other than the food and drink on your table. There are lots of visual distractions and obstacles to contend with. As curator of Gallery 6000 since 2008, I’ve often seen my role as equal parts local art presenter and interior decorator. Still, I also enjoy a fantasy role of a Twilight Zone maître d', singing his praises of the excellent menu to curious diners. Food for the mind is good for the heart. “Today’s chef’s special,” I eagerly intone to my imaginary guests, “is une casserole délicieuse !”  Let them eat art, I always say. 

   I have observed for several years how each of the three artists in this exhibit has honed a distinctly personal and intriguing brand of mark-making. Given the diversity of their pictorial styles, in distributing their works along the walls I wanted to preserve and spotlight their individuality and at the same time give the whole space a unified heartbeat. Granted, I’m a biased observer. Nevertheless, I think the air in the room crackles with palpable brio.

   Sherri Hornbrook calls her acrylic paintings of idiosyncratic shapes and patterns suspended in soft, spectral color fields collectively “a ray or speck of what’s in my head, intuitively gathered…”  What’s in her head might be snippets of remembered conversations, textures of objects, impressions of places, or ephemeral moods. What we see in turn is metaphorical in nature, as if those conversations have been edited down to fascinating abstractions - simple phrases or even single words, so to speak, interspersed with diacritical marks that float in misty space.

   Ariana Parry has written that her intimately-scaled graphite drawings are “…metaphysical visualizations inspired by my own meditative practice and relationship with the divine.” Despite the airy simplicity and sheer thinness of these elegantly measured linear configurations, and for all of that unoccupied white space of the picture plane wherein they hover - as if slowly turning or unfolding- there is nevertheless an uncanny implication of something objectively vast, something of immeasurable depth. There’s nothing empty or shallow here after all. You could call it the geometry or architecture of infinity.  

  Painter Eleanor Dillon Kuder says of her boldly colored figurative and organic forms, “I believe in possibilities beyond our realities. It is like the scent of lilacs amidst the chaos.”  Possibilities beyond our realities…allegories, fantasies, dreamscapes.  Her images are loaded with infectious exuberance, and the emotive potency of her palette reminds me at times of Matisse and Chagall on steroids. Her paintings in this context are like a robust marinade for an already zesty entrée.  

  Here then, three divergent styles converge on one space. Together they make for a memorably hearty aesthetic feast, simmering in the exhilarating aromas of the mystical and poetic. 

   So please join me for the artists’ reception on September 27. Bon appétit !

   PHOTOS, from top: Vision, by Sherri Hornbrook; Seclusion, by Sherri Hornbrook; Essentials, by Ariana Parry; Contained, by Ariana Parry; Cut From the Fold, by Eleanor Dillon Kuder; Mine, by Eleanor Dillon Kuder