ed marion at gimme!

Ed Marion, Chad Crumm, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12"

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Ed Marion has made a name for himself locally as a painter of portraits and landscapes. Although numerous artists have focused on the area's rural and natural environments, Marion is one of the few to focus on cityscapes. His style is gestural, but his pieces are faithful and detailed enough to strongly evoke their subjects.

Through April 30, Marion showed a recent series of portraits at Gimme! Coffee's recently renovated space on Cayuga St.. Dating from 2008, the acrylic canvases are all square. Walking into the coffee shop from the street, the viewer will notice three large pieces (30" x 30") in a row to their right and six smaller (12" x 12") lined up to their left. The subjects are all local artistic luminiares — painters and players of stringed instruments. With one exception, each focuses on an individual.

A large-format Evil City String Band features four men standing in the foreground of a chalky-green, grassy field, otherwise deserted. Their clothes are casual but calculatedly stylish. They face more or less forward, wielding their various instruments somewhat stiffly. They seem oddly detached from each other and from us. And they are detached from their (surprisingly) pastoral setting, as if Marion is unsure how to place figures convincingly within a space lacking sharp angles. Illogic of posture compounds illogic of narrative — what are these guys doing out there? The landscape and figures are both fine in themselves, but don't fit together. Canvas size seems to compound this problem, since Marion tends to use small painterly gestures to create structure and rhythm.

Trevor MacDonald also appears to be another casualty of oversize. Its the worst piece in the show by a comfortable margin. Trevor, scruffy-looking, stands in front of a a tilted American flag. His right arm holds up an electric guitar, itself sporting a starburst pattern of red and white stripes. His left hand rests on his chest in a patriotic gesture. Everything is more or less red, white and blue. There is a mismatch of styles. Marion's subtle palate and gesturalism do not easily combine with hard-edge patterning.

Evil and Trevor both sport lurid, bright orange under-painting. This technique is used more prominently and more effectively in several of the smaller canvases, where it gives life to Marion's whitish colors. (This is particularly so for the over-painted skin-tones, which tend towards the disturbingly undead-looking.)

It also appears in the strongest of the large pieces, Paul McMillan. While too many of those have struggling-to-fill-all-this-space-type backgrounds, McMillan mostly avoids that trap. It shows a profile view of the artist in his cramped-looking studio, behind brushes and bric-a-brac, wielding a fine brush with concentration. He wears glasses and what appears to be a blue t-shirt. He has a mustache and dark, shoulder-length hair.

Painter Brody Parker Burroughs is shown, from the upper chest up, standing in front of one of his own pictures. The painting within a painting makes up the whole background, which gives Brody a flattened, compressed quality. Burroughs' downturned head is imperfectly mirrored by a more sketchily rendered one behind him. Otherwise, the "backdrop" has a jazzily rendered life of its own which threatens to steal attention from the ostensible subject. Again, the orange under-painting emphasizes this; there seems to be a light emanating from Burroughs' image.

Two more portraits feature local painters. Jim DeGraff is the only one here to face us, rather than his painting or an unspecified point. He does so grinning. He wears a baseball cap and a thick, hooded shirt, both green. His painting is in the background, to the left, tilted, and cut-off. It shows the torso of a woman, wearing a loose-fitting white shirt and blue pants.

Erica Pollock — we see her head and shoulders — wears a blue shirt and looks off to her right. Although she covers perhaps half of the (real) canvas, she again seems unsubstantial compared to her background. In this case it is a busy street scene. It may initially be unclear whether she is standing in front of a painting or the (depicted) real thing. But an edge near the lower left corner indicates that she is indoors.

More musicians are the subjects of the remaining small pieces. A portrait of guitarist Sim Redmond again makes effective use of an orange under-layer. Fiddler Chad Crumm is also well-served, while guitarist Kevin Kinsella comes out somewhat too sketchy.

Spaces rather than people seem to be Ed Marion's strongest point. Some of the backgrounds here are more engaging and life-like than the protagonists that occupy them, sometimes awkwardly. Still, with the exception of the two large paintings mentioned above, each piece here has much to recommend it.

species of spaces

Ed Marion, Gimme Tburg, 2006, acrylic on masonite, 20"X20"

Ed Marion, Downtown Ithaca, 2006, acrylic on masonite, 12"x36"

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The landscapes of Ed Marion and Carlton Manzano make a decent match. Marion, working from photographs, paints mostly urban scenes. Manzano works in plein air from his minivan, exploring the countryside. Both make modestly sized, loosely brushed work—Marion using mostly acrylic and Manzano using oils. Their two person show Ithaca: The City in the Country is up this month at the Upstairs Gallery. The work within attempts to reconcile painterly invention and invented color with the evocation of real spaces (the latter will likely be familiar to Ithacans). Marion's paintings, though uneven, are the more compelling.

Downtown Ithaca is a particularly strong example of Marion's style and observation. The painting, which is on masonite, is wide and panoramic. Its colors are whitish, "pastel," giving it a slightly dreamy quality. The view is from the middle of a wide road (slightly toward the right lane). The blue-gray street is in perspective and disappears about halfway up the panel where it is intersected by another, barely visible street running left-right. On either side of the road are parked cars in dull colors, and a pair of boxy, multistory buildings—pink and beige on the left and red on the right. Also visible on the right is a wide sidewalk, a mass of greenery, and a tall pole with two gray banners. In the back of the other intersecting street are more buildings. Most notable are a pink and white one with crennelations toward the left and a pair of pointed church towers closer to the middle. What makes the piece is a tilted white square toward the center of the panel—the back of a Fed-Ex truck at middle distance. It pulls the viewer into the scene.

Also notable are three of Marion's showing area coffee shops (the two Gimme! Coffees in downtown Ithaca plus the one in Trumansburg). In each, the view is from right outside the storefront, the street and sidewalk visible in the immediate foreground. Gimme! Tburg is the best of these. The warm colors—particularly a layer of orange underpainting that seeps through in places—suggest early twilight. The road is tilted upwards to the right. The architecture is richly detailed. A pair of wavelike benches flank the sides of the door. To the left (in the foreground) is a covered staircase leading who knows where. Near the middle of the panel hangs a red sign. The white lettering is carefully blurred, lest the piece become mere advertisement.

Gimme! Cayuga features similar colors, although the suggestion is of broad daylight. A pair of figures pose under the striped awning, perhaps facing each other. The flat, frontal view is broken towards the right, the building corner. Gimme! State is the least interesting of the three. Its dull color and dull character are perhaps reflections of the boring brick-box architecture.

Several of Marion's paintings feature figures—strolling around the city or playing music. An interesting example of the latter is Guitar Progression. Made up of four small square canvases, it shows a guitarist, wearing a cowboy hat, a loose white shirt, and a pair of shades. He is engaged in a kind of comic strip action sequence. Like Marion's best figures, it substitutes gestural energy for realistic rendering.

Befitting their on-site execution, Manzano's oils are rougher and seemingly more casual than Marion's work. While this is a legitimate way of working, the results here seem uneven. Too often, the hairlike, impressionistic brushstrokes seem undirected, more concerned with filling space (one way or another) than with describing form and topography. At least two exceptions stand out.

Departure After the Harvest is one of these. It is a classic autumn scene: animated clouds against a pale blue sky, a flock of birds flying south, brown and orange trees, an abandoned field (beige), cornstalks, mud and dirt (with blue water, echoing the sky). In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh, the strokes of paint form a rhythmic zig-zag pattern, top to bottom. This compelling texture is enlivened by short, curly marks carved into the paint (perhaps with the handle of a brush). This technique is used elsewhere, where it seems more like an affectation.

Like Harvest, Wide Awake Farm and Summer Clouds feels unusually considered, with things going on in different layers of space. In the foreground, towards the left, is an off-kilter jumble of farm buildings, tinted purple. To their right is a pink tractor and a pair of tall, crooked telephone poles, their wires hanging loosely. In the background is a hilly green landscape bordered top and bottom by rows of trees. A distant road climbs up near the center. At the top is a strip of sky. This sort of picturesque rustic mess is typical of Manzano's work, the careful composition somewhat less so.

And from the same issue, check out Wylie Schwartz's feature on the Ink Shop's current show.