After Images The woman, eyes closed, body tinged an earthen orange-red, gently caresses the breast of an attendant crow cradled in her hand. It is a tender image, for she and the (stuffed) bird appear in repose and adoration, content with one another’s company. But for the classic art literate, there is something hauntingly familiar here, a shadow, a gossamer memory. Only upon reflection does one realize it is a living homage to Pablo Picasso’s “Woman with a Crow,” crafted toward the end of the artist’s “Blue Period.” Titled “Nina/After Crow,” it is one in a series of portraits by Amy Arbus — she of a dynasty of photographers of both the odd and the everyday — that literally bring to life the works of some of the world’s most beloved painters. The traveling exhibit and accompanying book, “After Images,” to be on display through May 24 at Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts in … [Read more...] about Amy Arbus
May/June 2015
Tom Culora: Shock and Awe
Asking Questions at Van Vessem In anticipation of an exhibition featuring the work of painter and mixed-media artist Tom Culora, I visited his studio in a wasabi-green cinderblock building that once housed a handkerchief mill in Warren, Rhode Island. Thirty-something years ago, Culora received a full scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, earning a BFA. Delving into the art history of the late 19th and early 20th century, he developed an unbridled appreciation for painters like Edward Hopper, Robert Henri and others who offered images of “everyday people.” At that time, he was too earnest for irony. That has changed. Culora has worked much of his life in the military — he is an aircraft pilot and an authority on underwater warfare — and in international relations and security. Culora’s career path took an unusual twist, and yet that deviation from the standard … [Read more...] about Tom Culora: Shock and Awe
Tyler Vouros
After-Life At Seen Gallery Sunflowers in the drawings of Tyler Vouros are really portraits of flora mort super-sized and emerging from the depths of their velvety black backgrounds. Through May 24, SEEN Gallery in Pawtucket presents a selection of Vouros’ works that emote expressive hyperrealism, featuring gigantic owls drawn by the artist. Titled “AFTER-LIFE,” his solo exhibition puns upon the notion of things organically dead while aiming for a style of aesthetic freshness. Vouros’ works also can be interpreted as still lifes, and as such have a directed cascade of light that informs them internally. They are built-up using techniques that maximize variations in mark-making. Vouros has created tonally complex and visually engaging surfaces. He uses a water bath to bond his finished drawings to canvases that are then stretched onto wooden supports. It is an incongruous method … [Read more...] about Tyler Vouros
Easy Does It In Groton
Controlled Capriciousness in 2-D and 3-D Emphatic whimsies are on display at two separate, unrelated exhibitions in Groton, Mass. “Past, Present, Paper,” at the Conant Gallery is a group exhibition presenting skillfully crafted collage arrangements in mixed-media by four New Hampshire-based artists: Soosen Dunholter, Jane El Simpson, Vivienne Strauss and Margaret Baker. “Less the Distance,” at the de Menil Gallery, is a site-specific, immersive style, kinetic installation by Laura Hughes who lives and exhibits regularly in Portland, OR. While these two exhibitions were not organized in collaboration with one another, they do share a common theme: contemplative and amusing messages presented gently in the form of constructions that explore spatial relationships, borrowing ideas from sculptural method. On view are two- and three-dimensional examples of what can be done with newly … [Read more...] about Easy Does It In Groton
Turning The Page
Cuban Artists Escape The Routine Cuba is turning a new page in its international relations as we speak, but flip back some in the book of Cuba’s history and you’ll come upon equally transformational moments you wouldn’t have found on the front page of the New York Times. Fresh and alive for viewing at the Cambridge Multicultural Art Center, “Still Running: Afro-Cuban Art” samples one of the many branching artistic currents which have and still do enrich Cuba’s vital past. It all started back in the late 1970s when Cubans with an African heritage banded together, in a movement they called “Grupo Antillano” to paint and sculpt and print with conscious reference to the West African cultural and religious cosmos of their ancestors. This artistic movement might sound like a program stiff with ideology for which a modern viewer would need a guidebook with footnotes. And it could … [Read more...] about Turning The Page
Light Shines in Providence
Two Shows Exuberantly Celebrate Summer Celebrating summer, the Providence Art Club presents two exhibitions: “Color and Light” is a solo showcase of colorful interpretations of Italian landscape by the exuberant Madolin Maxey, while “A Sense of Light” is a group exhibition featuring contemporary traditionalism and expressive-realism. Maxey’s landscapes are explosions of feeling. They communicate what she describes as a “burst of joy” and creative energy after almost four years struggling with and recovering from serious eye surgery. The Italian landscapes are real locations traveled by the artist. The final paintings are, to her, imaginative maps. Land, sky, and sea are presented at odd angles and distorted points-of-view, as if she’s seeing multiple directions simultaneously. In these compositions, Maxey is flying overhead and around the space as if in a childlike dreamscape of … [Read more...] about Light Shines in Providence