THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407290092
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: ART REVIEW
SOURCE: BY VIRGINIA VAN HORN, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
THE CURRENT edition of the ``Artist's Portfolio'' at Charles H. Taylor Arts Center is one of the most eccentric and interesting Tidewater Artists Association exhibitions in recent memory.
Juried this year by well-known Richmond artist Greig Leach, the annual show is designed to provide artists with the opportunity to display a consistent series of three to five related works.
The show is sparse regarding the usual manifestations of the Tidewater scene. There's not a seagull in sight. But two of the strongest examples of works on paper deal with the local landscape - one in a more traditional style, the other more flamboyant.
``Sunrise in the Meadow,'' a vibrant oil pastel by Janice Gay-Maker, transplants Monet to Virginia Beach. Its optical power is derived from the simple but effective use of complementary colors, with yellow light behind violet trees casting blue shadows across an orange field. Although strongly influenced by the great French Impressionist, the drawing wonderfully conveys the sense of light and space intrinsic to the land.
Karen Breeden's work, on the other hand, is an architect's nightmare. Her three large oil pastel drawings of Eastern Shore buildings are as animated as a worm on a hook - not a straight line in the bunch.
A gas station, a Victorian house, and ``Armando's'' place all seem abandoned. There are no inhabitants and no other structures nearby, but the buildings themselves don't seem to care, as they wiggle and sway with energy and life.
Superimposition - the use of layers of imagery - seems to be the leitmotif of the exhibition, both in photos and paintings. The third-place award winner, Alice McClanahan, develops translucent veils of imagery in her series of five photographs depicting individual human figures. Anonymous men and exotic gypsy women inhabit mysterious, moldering rooms. Bare lightbulbs and peeling paint contrast with shimmering floral patterns in a kaleidoscope of sensual and decayed forms.
Photographer Susan Dy also works with combinations of ruined buildings and the human figure. In ``Shatification,'' doe-like human eyes peer out at the viewer as the face dissolves into a wrecked wall; a transparent mechanical diagram overlaps the scene. Dy's photographs parallel the high hopes of the Industrial Revolution with the evidence of destruction and desolation.
If Dy's photos are melancholy, Nadara Goodwin's hand-colored cyanotypes are jubilant. Her puckish ``Girls of Summer'' fuses disparate images in an abundant cavalcade of nude girls dancing, huge blue flowers, lizards and a single bee. A ``Midsummer Night's Dream'' of blossoming fertility, Goodwin's work celebrates nature ascendant.
Oil painting captured the exhibition's top two awards. First place went to L. Tryon Jennings for her series of lurid paintings that suggest the claustrophobia of suburban life as seen from the covert perspective of a fly on the wall. Second-place award winner Jenny Windsor is represented by five small portraits of women, each one sensitive and deftly handled in a manner reminiscent of Portsmouth painter Charles Sibley.
The paintings run the gamut from Windsor's gentle studies to the bizarre. Some very quirky pieces are included. Rick Alma contributes a trio of loony, polka-dot acrylics, while a pair of painted plaster reliefs by Randy Holmes cast from rows of 8-inch nails and plastic picnic knives look oddly appropriate above the gallery's prim, traditional fireplace.
Over in the corner, effete, bald, giraffe-necked characters star in Hunter Thomas' outlandish constructions. Finally, the most discretely eccentric works may be those of Willie Williams Jr. His fascination with birds is expressed in a pair of abstract paintings on paper that suggest bird's-eye views of the world crossed with the Surrealist inventions of Miro. ILLUSTRATION: ``She Was What It Is,'' a painting by Hunter Thomas, is one of
the works featured in ``Artist's Portfolio,'' the show on display
through Aug. 28 at the Charles H. Taylor Arts Center.
by CNB