An
artist friend of mine and I have been talking about how to view and judge a
work of art. She feels that if the work demonstrates artistic experience and
competence, if the colors are blended well, the drawn lines follow the bark on
the tree precisely and the shadows are credible, well, then, it's a solid piece
of art. And that’s enough.
But I
feel that if the first thing I notice is technique?
then a trickster, not an artist, has pulled me in.
Emily Dickinson told Thomas Wentworth Higginson that
If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
(Higginson reported Dickinson’s comment in a letter to his wife, 16 August 1870)
I
think that the visual arts should be “felt” in this same way. And that makes it
pretty subjective. Two exhibitions currently on in Connecticut are a good test
for me of just how “personal” art can feel.
The
Essex Art Association (on Main Street in Essex, Connecticut) has opened
"Mixed Bag," their Spring Juried Exhibition. This very strong show
consists of 80 works chosen from 246 entries. Jeff Cooley, the owner of a
gallery in Old Lyme, Connecticut, juried the exhibition, which is on view
through May 23, 2015. The space is large and open and there’s more than enough
room for art and viewers. I would like to single out the 3 works from the show that
stay with me, days later.
The
bright colors balanced by dark blues, and some of the brushstrokes, in Claire
Crosby’s watercolor, “The Last Café,” are Matissean. Like his work, Crosby’s shapes come forward into, but then
pull away from, a sense of figuration.
Thomas
Stavovy received “Best in Show” for a monotype called “Dappled,”
but I
found myself drawn to Stavovvy’s etching called “Tonal Gradation.”
There is something to the mix of
vertical soft brown rectangles, overlaid with darker and lighter rounded
scribbled lines, that, again, comes and goes, foreground and background
alternating. The freedom of marks here is intoxicating.
“Neverland,”
a mixed media piece by Pam Erickson, rows of xxxxx’s, stitches, stamps,
photographs and collages combine to suggest a series of rejections, and yet,
the random placement of all these “messages,” the x-ing lines that just run out
and the alluded-to yellow and orange depths promise something more.... cheerful.
This could be a page lifted from an artist’s book; it has the hand-crafted feel
of a transformed text. The title imagines a world of infinite play, and this
piece has that feel to me.
The
whole truth: I was so intrigued by the show and the artists that I am now a
member of the Essex Art Association.
Go and see this show, and the one after that... and check out the website, too: http://essexartassociation.com
