COSO’S NEW MEMBERS ARE FOR REAL

If you are seeking some good examples of contemporary realism, look no further than the Copley Society of Art’s New Members’ Show 2015, introducing 18 new Co|So member artists who hail from as near as Brookline and Cambridge, Mass. to as far away as County Kildare, Ireland. They join the Society’s roster of over 400 living members.

This exhibition focuses on realism from a variety of approaches including painting, drawing and photography, with only one artist working in abstraction. While traditional genres such as still life, landscape, seascape and rural/townscape are perhaps overly represented, there are some stand-out works that will make this exhibition well worth a visit.

New York painter Nicole Alger’s oil paintings, “Talking Woman” and especially “Talking Stick,” successfully combine photographic realism with expressive painterly abstraction to create a mystical moment, like an illustration from a myth or legend that I don’t yet know but would love to hear.

Brookline painter David Palmquist’s “Green Ranch House,” a horizontally blurred glimpse of a simple ranch house and old car, captures the fleeting visions of other lives seen and wondered at briefly as we speed through our lives in America. Palmquist’s “Row Houses” is a smaller piece, also in oils, addressing the same topic but in a completely different type of neighborhood.

Toronto-based artist Kate Taylor’s two acrylic and resin paintings are luminous and lovely, filled with color and energy. “Weeping Willow Sunset” captures the colors of evening and the vertical droop of willow branches in an abstract sensibility that conveys the feeling of a scene reflected in water without literal representation, while “Tall Cosmos” glimmers with multicolored splashes against a golden-yellow ground, like sparks flying up from a fire or a mass of hummingbirds rising into the air. Though not particularly large, Taylor’s paintings claim their space and make themselves heard.

Marcia Santore