Art review
Artists' Gallery's farewell to Columbia
Landscape themes seem
to reflect coming move to Ellicott City's Main Street
The summer group exhibit at the Artists' Gallery also qualifies as a farewell show, because this gallery located in the American City Building is about to move. After more than 20 years in downtown Columbia, the gallery plans to relocate by late summer to Main Street in Ellicott City.
Although that change in the local gallery landscape is not overtly commented upon by the exhibited artwork, you may find yourself thinking about landscape art in a general way. These artists explore an array of subjects, but quite a few of them go to nature for inspiration.
Deborah Hoeper's exhibited work includes the acrylic painting “Blue Sky,” which gets down to basics with an intensely blue sky above an unpeopled landscape. She establishes a marked contrast between the sky above and the land below.
More specific treatments of the landscape include Bonita Glaser's watercolor “Caleb's Horses.” Much of the composition is given over to a pale green field, with three horses in the middle distance and a barn and trees in the background. There's a sense of pastoral calm here.
Glaser places those horses within a wide-open landscape, but Rana Geralis opts for a much more tightly cropped image in the watercolor “Little Spotted Pony.” By depicting a single pony up close, Geralis calls your attention to this brown-spotted white pony.
Some of the artists have a particular interest in the marshy zone where water meets land. Deborah Maklowski's pastel “Passage” has a narrow inlet cutting through a marsh. The brown reeds make for a gently monochromatic mood.
Joyce Bell's watercolor “South Carolina View” has a somewhat blurred blend of green and blue to suggest marshy terrain, and background trees to indicate where one would find solid ground.
Exploring nature in her own spare way is Jing-Jy Chen, whose watercolor and ink “Pine and Cranes” features a tree and two white cranes. The birds have such beautifully arching necks that they seem capable of performing ballet choreography.
Also relatively minimal in her presentation of nature is Diane Dunn, whose watercolor “Longwood Water Lilies” presents several green and pink rings to represent the lilies floating in purple-hued water.
Yet another artist who is very selective about how she presents nature is Ellen Corddry. Her watercolor “Columbine” emphasizes the long, curling stalk that supports a single flower. The rest of the composition is empty white space.
This reductive approach is shared by Susan Gleason, whose pastel and acrylic “Maui Palm” only has a single lofty palm tree set against the sky; and Gleason's pastel “Maui Sunset” is completely about that yellow and pink sky.
Landscape also is, er, natural subject matter for some of the photographers in the show.
John Stier's “Machu Picchu” takes you to that ancient site in Peru. His high-angle view down toward the long-abandoned city gives a keen sense of its isolation within steep terrain. Also, the photographer effectively captures the strong sunlight raking across this cityscape.
Getting down to earth and staying within modern society, another travel-oriented photographer, Jerry Weinstein, presents various figures painted on a city wall in “Wall Art, Cartagena, Colombia.”
Bringing a bit of the natural world indoors is Joan Forester. Her hand-painted, black-and-white photo “Tulips in Glass” has delicate tones of green applied to the leaves and yellow to several tulips resting in a water-filled glass. Otherwise, her composition has no colors other than the subdued gray shadows falling upon the shelf and backing wall.
Among the other mediums represented in this show is woodworking that typically produces bowls, boxes and other things that definitely could serve a practical purpose but seem like they would be just fine as purely decorative items.
Jordon Kitt's “Rosewood Hollow Form” is a small bowl notable for the narrow base that makes the bowl rising up from that base seem even rounder and fuller than it otherwise might. Also appealing is that the wood grain has subtle variations to contemplate.
Dave McCann's “Jewelry Box” is made from cherry and maple. You could store your valuables inside, but the richly contrasting appearance of those two woods makes the box itself seem valuable.