think small

Yongjeong Kim, My Map III, Mixed Media, 14.5" x 14.5"

Times:

Ending an impressive year at the Main Street Gallery is the latest of its annual small-paintings exhibitions. Programming has ranged from strong solo shows by distinguished local artists Victoria Romanoff and Kumi Korf to less-even group efforts focused by theme or medium. Come 2008, the gallery will be on hiatus for about two and half months. "2007 Small Works Painting" is a fitting conclusion, eclectic but well-balanced. Pieces were chosen from submissions by painter Joy Adams (an emeritus professor at Ithaca College) and gallery director Roger Smith.

My Map II and My Map III find common ground between abstract art and cartography. Both are by local artist Yongjeong Kim. Her two acrylics are relatively large - fourteen and a half inches square - and incorporate bits of fabric and other collaged materials. Apparently influenced by modernist artists like Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Chuck Close, they show loop-filled aerial views of rivers, roadways, and buildings. The painted areas are often murky, lacking in color contrast. The fabric additions help both pieces in this regard, particularly III.

According to the artist, II loosely depicts the outside and inside of her local Warrenwood apartment building, including her L-shaped sofa and imagined views of neighboring apartments. III zooms out a bit to show nearby Triphammer Mall and its surrounds. The correspondence is loose.

Aerial perspective is a compelling artistic device. Abstraction in art can be an effort at transcending the visible world, whereas realism tends to focus on the concrete and the everyday. Birds-eye landscapes can have the best of both worlds. They present familiar places in a de-familiarizing way. At least a handful of local artists are working in this rich vein. Barbara Page's scale-jumping paintings and her natural-historical mixed-media relief Rock of Ages, Sands of Time (at the Museum of the Earth) come to mind. Kumi Korf has a print show up this month at Chandler Fine Art in San Francisco. Included are large intaglio pieces in which cutout-like abstract bird-shapes trail curves over brushy backgrounds. Craig Mains has done a number of witty prints showing burning crop circles. (Unlike the other artists above, his perspectives are from oblique angles and sometimes show the horizon.)

Two pieces offer more straight-up forms of abstraction. John McLaughlin's jaunty oil Fair Fun features a cascade of fluid brushstrokes, both translucent and opaque. Pale, whitish blue dominates the background; these are overlaid in white, mustard yellow, ochre, and purplish grays. Thinner, rope-like curls of paint sit on top. Metamorphosis by Laura Glenn is perhaps a bit too sweet. The piece is done in watercolor and ink on paper, with little torn-paper bits collaged. Pinks, blues, and purples dominate. Calligraphic forms in black resemble Chinese characters, and the composition has something of the all-over evenness of the written page.

Four artists are showing work in encaustic (melted wax mixed with color pigments). The medium is seductive as well as novel; a temptation seems to be to use it to build up luscious surfaces while neglecting the underlying image. Paul Kline's Stairways buries an angular photo-collage of shadowed stairs in translucent white, a seemingly incongruous atmospheric effect. Martha Ferris' NOT is more texturally interesting; unlike the other wax pieces, the surface is scratchy and weathered-looking rather than smooth. A standing silhouetted woman bends down; layered over her is an uneven translucent grid and three blocky letters: N O T. The yellow-red-blue color scheme is effective, if obvious. Neither these nor Paul Kline's Toxic Plaza nor Martha Ferris' Sherry's Closeup (a fragmented femme fatale in blue, green, pink-red and peach) quite lives up to their textures.

A pair of tiny portraits by Vanessa Irzyk provides one of the show's few compelling investigations of the human figure. Induced is done with watercolor and polyurethane on board, while Swaddled adds oil paint to the mix. Each features a mischievous, child-like face, surrounded by white. The heads are built in an almost sculptural way, composed of layers of translucent brushstrokes which are loose but short and finicky. Unexpected colors include pale pinks and oranges as well as a dark, purplish red (the latter mostly in Induced). Induced is a diptych; the right side is mostly empty.

Landscapes and cityscapes are more common themes. Margaret Olney-McBride presents a pair of bookmark-sized panoramic oils on paper. The wintery fields and trees of Landscape Slice and the sea-like cloudscape of Sky Fragment 2 (its low low horizon capping silhouetted hills) are rendered in brushstrokes which pack a suprising amount of energy into such a small space. Jerry Schutte's Kansas is comparable, although its impasto is thicker and more stolid. The urban scenes show a greater stylistic range: from the flat and (overly) dry illustrational quality of Sue Wall's Brownstones and City Roof Tops to the whitish colors of Erica Pollock's impressionistic Overpass.

eye in the sky

Early publication in the Times this week, due to the holiday:

Jay Hart comes to the world of art from that of science. The Trumansburg artist comes out of a career of several decades in map-making and in the study of geomorphology (the processes by which land-forms acquire their shapes). He has long been fascinated by the beauty of the land, and that of the pictures we use to represent it.

Recently, he has turned his skills and knowledge toward the making of more purely aesthetic images. The world seen from space is his subject. He is currently showing samples of his "terrain art" at Cornell University's Mann Library. These are large-format digital prints, many human-size or larger. They have been mounted to foam boards and are directly exposed rather than being protected by the expected glass. Each print is part of a limited edition.

Along with the differently colored Plains of Tidikelt, both Transitions and Greater Somalia were made using only color-coded elevation data. Although perhaps scientifically interesting, these two are less aesthetically rich than the others. White and violet mark the highest spots, green and tan the middle range, and reddish orange the lowlands. Hart has chosen to make bodies of water an uninflected black. This helps these images quite a bit by offsetting the sharp, punchy 3D effect of all those tiny ridges and valleys (especially in the former piece). Still the overall affect of these gradations feels cold and mechanical, ill-suited to the grandeur and intricacy of the subject matter.

Transitions depicts the Finger Lakes area. Appropriately enough, Ithaca is in the center, although visible only as an orange tail on the south end of Cayuga Lake. The southeast part of Lake Ontario silhouettes the top left corner. Pennsylvania is to the south, highlighted by what look something like loose strokes of transparent paint—the Appalachian Mountains.

Most of the pictures in the show combine the elevations with one or more satellite images, added as a translucent layer. This gives them a greater range of color and texture which is much more aesthetically compelling. The color seems more naturalistic. We can also see human traces more directly. These images feel more concrete.

An analogy can be made with painting, and with abstract painting in particular. Traditionally, the earth has been a primary source for the pigments that give paints their colors. Synthetic pigments imitate their properties. The interaction of minerals with more fluid substances generates most of the forms seen in Hart's pictures. Although intentionally manipulated by the painter's hand, painting can involve similar natural processes. A number of abstractionists have made such processes central to their work. For example, Larry Poons' poured paintings and the "abstract landscapes" of local painter Barbara Mink come to mind. Similarities of shape and texture with Hart's work are in some cases quite remarkable.

The panoramic Al Kidan, with its painterly layering of copper, turquoise and cloud-like white, is a stunning image. Its also one of the most impressive pieces of trompe-l'œil that I've seen in a while. From a few feet away, it looks as if a striated pattern of copper pigment blobs has been applied, or has accreted, on to the smooth photographic surface. But no, the blobs are actually sand dunes in the Saudi Arabian desert. They cover most of the surface, save for a bit around the right edge.Their rich variety of density and direction reflects the changing of the winds. The effect is reminiscent of some of Gerard Richter's abstract paintings. If you look closely, you can see a network of roads and other signs of human habitation beneath. The piece is roughly human-size; if it were laid on the floor, you could sleep on it. Like several other pieces in the show, the piece is unconventionally oriented. To the left is north.

In Cape Farvel, left is south. The piece shows the southern tip of Greenland, with the bottom of the eastern shoreline running across near the bottom edge. The water is blue and turquoise. The land is mostly white, except of course around the shore, where it is pale gray and brown. Punctuating the coast are many lengthy fjords, with a wild cluster toward the middle. The scene looks something like a row of burnt out trees—an interesting shift of scale and perspective.

The installation of the show could have been better thought out. Several relatively small pictures are hung well above eye-level, overlooking an area where the gallery area transitions to stacks of books. This makes it impossible to get a suitably close look at the intricate details.

From the same issue: Wylie Schwartz's profile of local artist-writer Stephen Poleskie touches on aerial art of a rather different sort. Also check out these two paintings from his early-sixties realist period.