LEFT: Rhea Giffin, Mindful Navigation
Quite a few galleries have end-of-year exhibitions, including Tinman Artworks in the Garland District, Spokane, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho's The Art Spirit Gallery. Often this is a way to summarize an exhibition year or feature works in a slightly different format.
For Tinman, the annual exhibition often includes the "regulars" and newcomers. Familiar names like Harold Balazs, George Flett and
Some standouts include Rhea Giffin, who had a show (along with Virgina Carter, whose whimsical ceramics are well-matched to Giffin's pieces) at the Tinman earlier this fall but is new to the end-of-year exhibition. Giffin is one of my favorite 3D artists whose work is easily some of the best in papier mache, an underrated art form.
Other new artists include John Blessent (beautifully crafted metal jewelry) and E.L. Stewart (whose paintings are really growing on me since I saw her Dorothy in the Trees at Tinman's Ozvitational exhibit).
Sheila Evans is exhibiting at both Tinman and The Art Spirit with pastels (SEE IMAGE, RIGHT) that are just lovely. Often a painter is distinguished by his/her handling of the medium, specifically the ability to render light, lightness and color in a way that is beyond merely believable. Evans does that. Lovely.
Another artist included in both exhibitions is Mel McCuddin, whose work I don't mind admitting I deeply covet. It's figurative. It's got a bit of an edge to it. Little bits of surrealism. Amazing color. I could look at his paintings for a long time.
Elsewhere at The Art Spirit Gallery, which was packed this past Friday for the opening, artist Glenn Grishkoff showed a series of new brushes that delighted viewers with Glenn's characteristic off-beat humor. Michael Horswill is doing these mask-like wall pieces that incorporate some of his former object assemblage, really fascinating.
Other artists you'll want to be sure and see: Frank Boyden (SEE IMAGE, LEFT), Victoria Brace (her paintings are just getting better and better), Gina Freuen (ceramics with quite a bit of new stuff), Claudia Pettis (odd yet charming paintings of sheep), and Allen and Mary Dee Dodge (whose work I like but not love, yet their latest enamel and metal work shows Balazs' collaborative influence and is a fresh interpretation of the Dodge's vibrant color work).
Thirty-four artists total at Art Spirit and every inch of space carefully and purposefully used. Hats off (as usual) to Steve Gibbs for a diverse exhibit that is able to target specific markets without coming across as schlocky and never loses site of the art in artful display.
Friends invited us up to Holly Eve a few years back, where I bid and bought one of Bill Klein's watercolors at this annual Sandpoint community fundraising event. He's got a nice, clean style, befitting his work as an architect. And while his linework can be a little shaky at times, he has a good eye for the beauty of planar shapes, angles, shadows and textures. Check out his retrospective at Panhandle State Bank Building through February 28.
For more Sandpoint arts news, you're better off googling for the latest Facebook account than relying on some of my links!
Seems like every time I turn around my trusted www links have migrated to facebook, where keeping the website up-to-date is sooooo much easier for folks than having to go through one's web developer or similar third party.
Case in point: Pend Oreille Arts Council has a new facebook page with lots of event news, photos, and more current postings than their website has had all year (or maybe it just seems that way).
I haven't yet been to the Jacklin Arts Center but get lots of press info.
Mostly regional/local arts. Community-centered. A nice variety of exhibitions, including watercolor, woodworking, etc. Check them out!
Speaking of anachronisms, Morse Clary continues to use the book form as a "sculptural metaphor," as he describes it. Building on the premise of an open book, Clary articulates richly layered ideas that "read" as story, concept, emotion, setting.
They're both visual and verbal, with titles like Dialogue in Contrast (above) and Crossroads (below). They feel familiar, yet also rarified, old, sometimes appearing like an artifact of a forgotten language.
Clary, a college art instructor for 30+ years, engages the viewer, giving just enough information for us to want to reach out and learn more. His exhibition of "Journeys and Journals" continues through December 11 at NIC's Boswell Hall Gallery.
I love irony. It's one of the most basic yet versatile tools an artist has. James Green works in stone lithography, a printing method founded upon our earliest awareness of stone carving and image making. In his recent works, including an exhibition entitled In Defense of Thingness at Eastern Washington University, Greene explores the paradoxical state of image making.
From his statement: "What are we to make of a culture that considers digital books to have an infinite lifespan but considers stone tablets obsolete? If anything, stone tablets have more than proved themselves capable of survival into the future, while my digital photo files of only 5 years ago are a challenge to maintain and retrieve without some kind of digital corruption or data loss. For this exhibition, I consider our current technological moment while working with my hands to produce objects that stand out specifically because they are obsolete. I have grained and leveled 12 long-forgotten lithography stones (once used for commercial printing) in order to reinvigorate the value of satisfying craftwork and careful execution needed to perform this obsolete technological process. The objects depicted are things I either own or regularly use to perform tasks. All of them have been outstripped technologically, but all of them represent things that have proven successful at surviving into the future. These objects reflect a humanness and concreteness that is bound specifically to the interest they hold as things.
He also works in photography, prints and installations. I won't get to his show at EWU before it closes December 10, which is too bad because I was just talking with one of my editors about the lack of exhibitions showcasing truly contemporary art. And here's one of them (that won't get covered locally, unfortunately).
While it's not the kind of work I can immerse myself in the way I like to with narrative art, I appreciate the conceptual depth and challenge. It's this chicken/egg approach of the thing versus the image of the thing versus the making of the image versus the potency of the thing within our visual lexicon. The image above, for example, is a blower used for making fire. As Greene mentions, this is an object that has remained fairly unchanged over time. Not many objects can be regarded as such; there's such a bent to revise, improve, technologize.
For more mindblowing, check out his website at Valuistics.com.
Envy is not a pretty thing but I'll admit to it when it comes to Mary Maxam. At first, I envied her poise and patience when it came to teaching. When I met her 9-10 years ago, she ws the senior member of the visual arts faculty in Lakeland School District (the visual arts faculty consisting of her, myself and two junior high teachers).
Then, when I had opportunities to visit with Mary during rare unstructured collaboration days, I had all the more reason to envy her exceptional painting skills. Like this humble little painting of a reflective gift box shows, Mary Maxam knows paint. And color. And light.
With her specialties including fly fisherman, landscapes and the occasional still life, Mary shares her artful gifts via a self-titled website on which she has recently added "daily paintings."
Ok, so now I envy her one more thing: retirement (and time to paint).
She's been abroad for a bit, charcoal in hand and a keen eye for the delicious curves that populate her often haunting charcoal drawings. A field in Provence, France. The ridiculous curled lip of a sneering gargoyle. A shaft of light at the distant edge of an overgrown lake. These are the images that come into view from her painstaking process of charcoal drawing.
A long ways away from her beloved Palouse, Nelson nonetheless expresses elements of these foreign vistas as if they were a second home, fraught with all the mystery and moodiness that her earlier eastern Washington landscapes possessed.
At The Art Spirit until November 28.
