REVIEW: Edward Koren and Fulvio Testa at Big Town Gallery in Rochester

Cartoon Bestiary and Moody Landscapes

by Dian Parker

Why see art? Why go to art galleries, buy art, hang art on your walls? As one of my painter friends said, "There are already too many images in the world," so she rushes through art galleries only stopping at what moves her. Some people never go to galleries. I go because it invariably feeds something new to me that is not always observable in everyday life. It tweaks my view of the world, if only for a moment. I feel different when I look at art, far different than at any other time. Whether I like the work or not, I get a kick out of all individual expression and the human desire to create.

Art stimulates and rouses our curiosity. Without it we are poorer, whether the form of art be music, theatre, the visual arts, cooking, gardening, or even the ways we teach our children. We all strive to express. Art may not be necessary for us to survive but it is certainly necessary in order that we thrive and flourish. It fills us out. It feeds and sparks our imaginations, inspiring us to create, and creating makes us happy. Just look at the joy of a child’s imagination. It certainly gives me joy to see creativity expressed, in all forms: tractor parts, hay bales, a story, a concerto, paintings, and even cartoons.

Currently showing at the Big Town Gallery in Rochester are some of the original drawings of a longtime resident of Vermont, Edward Koren, best known for his cartoons and covers for The New Yorker magazine. His first cartoon in The New Yorker was 50 years ago! In this show, his fanciful furry creatures ride bicycles, dance and give speeches. Mini dramas, not unlike commedia dell’arte, the comedy of manners, where actors do their shtick with grande pomposity and elan.

As I stood before each drawing, mostly in ink and some quite large, 26" x 40", I laughed out loud. Koren’s work tickles and teases. I found myself making up captions for the work and going back to reexamine the horns on his characters’ wild heads and the way the clever beasts hold their bicycle handlebars, intently pedaling - a theatrical romp done with a wry wit. Each drawing is mounted on cut mat board which is a pleasing way of displaying the drawings and far less expensive if you choose to buy a piece. A comprehensive retrospective of his work is presently showing at the Fleming Museum in Burlington as well.

Also showing with Koren are 23 abstract watercolor landscapes by the Italian artist, Fulvio Testa. Testa was born in Verona, Italy and now lives 6 months of the year in New York City. His paintings are small (also not framed but mounted on white board), averaging 12" x 10". I preferred the work he painted this year to his older work. They show an evolution which is wonderful to see in any artist’s work. His moody watercolors are modest and delicate, evoking dreamy, allusive landscapes that could be imaginary or real. His colors are dense and often saturate the paper. I especially liked his "Untitled 14", "15" and "16", sensual washes of color and stroke, all three painted this year.

The pairing of these two creators is insightful. Both are gestural artists showing us the world in a flourish. Whereas Koren wryly observes society; Testa’s work are emotional, inner landscapes. You don’t have to like any of the work to like the show. As I said, art stimulates the palate, prodding us to dream up our own inner landscapes or to take our own maniacal bike ride, horned creatures that we are. The show runs till July 10.
This review was first published in the Randolph Herald, June 23, 2011 Images: Ed Koren, Untitled 26.25”x 40.25”, ink on Fabiano; Fulvio Testa, Untitled 15, 13 1/2” x 9 3/8” Photos by Dian Parker

Art Review: Collaborations with Nature – Janet Van Fleet and Emiko Sawaragi Gilbert @ the Flynndog

by Rob Hitzig

There is a fascinating show of wood sculptures, titled Afterward, at the Flynndog Gallery in Burlington, VT, Sept 30 - Oct 29, by Emiko Sawaragi Gilbert and Janet Van Fleet. Emiko's part of the show is titled Cornucopia and Janet's is All Aboard. Both artists have collaborated with nature to create the work. They haven't carved, painted, or significantly altered what is normally viewed as refuse and debris by most people, thereby helping the viewer to see the world in new and interesting ways.

Though not in a formal gallery, this show is likely to be one of the best you will ever wander into in Burlington; the rest of Vermont; or just about anywhere. Better still, the work is also some of the most affordable you'll find anywhere -- all but two of Emiko's pieces are available to a loving home as gifts from her and the Vermont forest from which they came while all of Janet's pieces, which she vows are not returning to her now clean studio, have no prices because she is happy to accept offers. Hence, this is a great place to do early holiday shopping (Janet's work is available as individual pieces or as their current groupings).

In Cornucopia, Emiko has used "scrap" branches and trees, left over from a firewood collection event, that are reshaped into interesting forms. Each is made from a single, continuous section of a tree. They are so well crafted that the viewer may wonder whether the forms are natural tree growths or caused by some other force of nature like bugs or wind.

In Janet Van Fleet's half of the show, titled All Aboard, she has cleaned out her studio and repurposed her found object sculptures from the last 12 years to create a metaphorical and visual "train" that depicts life in all its beauty and ugliness. Appropriately, The Eagle Points The Way To A Different Future, leads the parade. With its gnarly wood face and driftwood chip feathers, the eagle seems to have the wisdom needed for charting a better direction.

For a full review of the show and more images, please visit Rob's blog, www.woodisart.blogspot.com.

Art Review: Art in the Round Barn: 200 Years of Farming... 20 Years of Art!, Waitsfield

by Bev Kehoe

It’s been 200 years since settlers cleared some land on the way to Waitsfield Common and decided that it was a good place to build their homestead. It’s been 100 years since the farmers in that house felt they needed a big round barn to store the hay, milk the cows and feed the chickens. It’s been 25 years since the Simko family restored the grounds and created the luxurious Inn at Round Barn Farm, and 20 years since Doreen Simko and Anne Marie Simko deFreest felt that the milking parlor deserved an up-close experience with Art. And this is the first year that the Green Mountain Cultural Center chose to create an ‘invitational’ show rather than the juried show that usually occurs each September in the Round Barn.

Twenty-six artists were invited, and all said “Yes!" By creating an invitational show, Anne Marie felt that she wanted to “recognize and honor the artists who have been so supportive of the

art show in the past, and who have greatly contributed to the Vermont art community.” This enabled deFreest to curate a show that displays a diversely coherent range of styles and techniques that flows through the circular space with balance and grace.

This is a showing of Vermont artists in every configuration: in mediums that include metal and clay, watercolor and oil, encaustic wax, pastel, photography, granite and wood; in styles that span the modality from realism to abstraction; with artists that live here just a few months a year as well as those who are first or sixth generation Vermonters; in a display of artistic experiences that are described from the hearts of venerable masters, diligent devotees and ambitious newcomers. The whitewashed walls and natural burnished floors of the barn create a warm but neutral backdrop of Vermont-wide artists, with a healthy mix of Mad River Valley artists.

When you walk in the door you are charmed by five pieces by Bill Brauer, who has nurtured his world-renowned career in a studio located just one mile up the road. His inspiration from the Renaissance is evident, as he says, ‘in a fascination with the human form, taking Renaissance concepts of the figure and combining them with my contemporary design sense…Formally the paintings are about shapes next to shapes and colors next to colors, with influences from the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians. A single light source and shallow visual field create a tension and dramatic dark-to-light patterns that help to emphasize that something is happening just beyond the picture plane.” This mystery and drama plays out with pieces entitled, ‘Cleopatra Meets the Sphinx,’ ‘Art Lovers,’ and ‘In Another Place.’

These pieces pull you in the two directions that lead you around in a circular array of art, paintings on the walls interlaced with sculptural structures that are as heavy as granite and as light as the air between the intricate —or massive— three-dimensional shapes. Robert Birbeck’s wood or stone pieces display a well-polished sense of humor in pieces such as ‘Honey I’m Home’ and ‘You’re Not In Kansas Anymore.’ John Brickels’ humor, by contrast, emerges from clay and ceramic constructions that juxtapose gritty dirt-colored structures with colorful vinyl dime-store props. ‘Vertico Barn III’ is singularly creative, topsy-turvy and one-of-a-kind (oh, wait, there must have been a ‘I’ and a ‘II’…)

Three Mad River Valley sculptors—Mireille Clapp, John Matusz and Mark Eliot Schwabe—put their hearts into steel and copper, aluminum and bronze. Mireille Clapp, with a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT, delights in the concept of order/disorder, taking the strength of steel and transforming it into statements of freedom and roughness. Mark Schwabe has plied his art for 40 years with a scale that ranges from 12 feet high...to one half inch wide. He pushes pure geometric shapes into a precarious balance; he cuts away a simple clean form to show lava-rock-like inner turmoil; he works intricately, intimately in fantastical miniature scale.

John Matusz wields his welding equipment in the old firehouse in town where he burns up rock and steel into industrial-sized monuments. His pieces are raw, massive statements of a fierce artistic temperament. In contrast, the sculptures of Bruce Hathaway, especially ‘The Perfection Within’ are lilting melodies in metal. His aluminum & ‘mild steel’ pieces on maple or cherry bases are soft excursions into an artistic sensibility that dances with a Calder-esque mobility.

While the sculptures anchor the flow of the artistic expression, the soul of the show is the diversity of the paintings. Three Mad River Valley painters (in addition to Brauer) are displayed: Candy Barr in oils, Gary Eckhart with watercolors, and Marilyn Ruseckas in pastel. Candy Barr’s duo of moose images, ‘Stillness in Winter’ and ‘Early Spring Moose’ have the viewer tiptoeing up quietly to avoid disturbing the woodland creatures in all their massive glory. The complementary palette used creates a compelling lightness within the deep, rich colors. Candy reiterated this very natural theme by personally hewing the frames from birch trees right outside her Warren studio loft. Marilyn Ruseckas creates alluring visual oxymorons with her dense, dark pastels. Her play of dark against light and semi-surrealistic earth forms move into organic abstractions. Gary Eckhart’s watercolors contain a heightened sense of representation in pieces such as ‘Simply Buckets’ and ‘Exposed.’ Although the subject matter is traditional imagery of barns, sugar houses and buckets, the textural layering of muted pigments within these shapes emerge into a depth of color and form that create moving, nostalgic reminders of simpler times gone by.

Bonnie Acker, a strong supporter of the Art in the Round Barn through the years, finds flame and fire, air and water within the abstractions of her landscapes. A strong horizontal landing zone within the paintings allow for soaring skies and fiery vertical breath. Simple, strong oils that dance deeply in the pastel modes of jewel-like color flicker one against the other for a luminous expression of love for the Vermont landscape. Elizabeth Allen’s oils, by contrast, are dreamier, more realistic representations of ‘Waitsfield Autumn’ and ‘Sundown on Lake Champlain.’ If dreamy art is intriguing, discover the large scale oils of Janet Fredericks in a display a faraway fairy tale abstraction. They seem to clearly state a reflection of inner emotional landscapes in concert with sketchy flora and fauna while fading in and out of sunny, summery color schemes. And if radiant light is to your liking, the oils of Joy Huckins-Noss are landscapes that seem to echo pointillism until you look up close and detect the three dimensional, rough layering of oil that create rifts and valleys of shadow and high peaks of complementary colors that glow with the luminosity of seasonal colors.

The oils of Kevin Fahey garnered him a ‘Best of Show’ accolade at the 2009 Art in the Round Barn Show, and especially his ‘Modern Explorer’ and ‘Mesmerized at Basin Harbor’ clearly show why. His sweeping drifts of shadow and light along the waves and beaches create bold statements of color and form. A more whimsical version of bold color opens up in Anne Cady’s oils where shapes and rhythms, patterns of light in nature reflect a simple playfulness that reveals the artist’s involvement with children and art.

If your idea of pastel is dreamy impressionistic styles, take a bite out of the pastels of Lucy Petrie. They revolve around a degree of detail that is dramatically literal, with mouthwatering explosions of color in ‘Orange Slice & Lime Wedge’ and ‘Kiwi & Orange.’

Frank Woods takes in his landscapes, feels and then responds to the “pull of abstraction.” His modernistic take on Quebec landscapes is strong pure color anchored by a dark under painting. In contrast, Helen Shulman starts her oils as realistic figures, and through a series of layering, works them into a powerfully geometric matrix of abstraction that shows little of the original sketch. Even so, they contain an organic depth that intuitively breathes light into pieces such as ‘Shifting Sands.’ Shulman concludes, “I work in a space patrolled by knowledge and challenged by intuition.”

This sentiment could be the theme of the 2010 Art in the Round Barn. The 26 artists hold an immense volume of technical knowledge in the areas of

materials, surfaces, color theory, composition and history. They use those skills and experience to transform their emotion and intellect into paintings and sculpture that challenges and soothes, inspires and animates the world around them. The Art in the Round Barn is open daily from 9:30 am to 5 pm daily except on Saturday when the Barn is closed at 2:30, and runs through October 11. For more information, call 802-496-7722 or go to www.theroundbarn.com.

Bev Kehoe is Coordinator of the Vermont Festival of the Arts.

Art Review: Ethan Azarian, Melissa Knight at Rose St co-op, Burlington

by Darby Parsons

Ethan Azarian and his wife Melissa Knight are showing simultaneously at the Rose Street Artist Gallery Co-op at 78 Rose St. in Burlington. An opening reception on Saturday October 2 included the artistic duo playing music live. Originally from Barre, Vermont Ethan Azarian and his wife, from Australia mainly reside in Austin, Texas but have kept close ties in the Vermont and Burlington community.

Ethan paints tiny wood blocks and large unstretched canvases in bright simple forms; city scapes that are very linear with a row of houses in the back slightly abstracted with a curve or slant. White Village is a large triptych of an off-white village that would disappear into the same shade of sky if it weren’t for the dark, impossibly simple lines that make the home’s roofs. Multiple wood block sets are filled with the skylines of Mexico and New York City. Many of the pieces have only been recently completed in and around Burlington. Ethan stresses his intent to get out into the community to create his art as part of his job as an artist. Melissa Knight’s fabric collages of birds, flowers and gardens hearken back to a folk craft except the brilliant colors are too vibrant and moving to speak of antiquity.

The couple pursue community as much as graphic arts and music; their home in Austin serves as a gallery and Ethan recently painted a 40ft mural in an old rail yard building near the tracks of Flynn Ave for the South End Art Hop. The small family returns to Austin at the end of October. The show will be on view at the Rose Street Gallery until then.

EVENT REVIEW: Jonathan Blow at Firehouse Gallery

by Stephen Orloske

While the pressure of an ever connected culture presses leisure time into units of multitasked consumption, videogames use the tools which distract us (anything with a chipset) to become a medium so engrossing anything else that blinks or beeps gets shut out. Take a look at the portraits of Phillip Toledano’s Gamers and their bestial grins seem like defiant gestures against the languid stare multimedia surfing normally elicits (Check yourself in the webcam. Yep, that’s the face.). But there is an uneasiness when looking at these portraits, as though you’re standing too close to some primal zealot. Perhaps all that sneering, teeth sucking and tongue curling seems especially barbaric knowing it’s all been drawn out just by having thumbs on a virtual peashooter and that these people have been tricked into rapturous states (and out sixty bucks) by games that are no more than hyper-Pavlovian experiments. Just one zombie-alien slugfest or benumbing pachinko simulator after another. There isn’t much else, right? Well, the “else” is being played at the Firehouse Gallery.

Take another moment and play the ’93 shooter classic Doom (but come back). Seventeen years later and most videogames have yet to innovate from this basic run, gun and reward formula. Now go play something Burlington City Arts put up, like Jason Rohrer’s Passage (come on, download it). Still using mazes and treasure (and a princess), but with fewer pixels and one less spatial dimension, Passage compels the player to contemplate life, love and death within five minutes, while Doom and its clones belabor the reptilian wisdom of spawn, kill and score for hours (or even days). What raises a videogame above the libidinal horizon most aspire to is a neglected question. And one vocal game designer self-tasked (or masochistically cursed) with trying to define why videogames are a unique and vital art form recently spoke as part of the Game(life) exhibit and lecture series: Jonathan Blow.

Even before the critical and popular success of his game Braid, Jonathan Blow spoke up about the way videogames abuse their own potential (like the monotony of Warcraft). To summarize his lesson (I’ll be bold), get your head out of that Hollywood muck. Basically, they have yet to realize it’s the game which conveys meaning, not the cutscenes peppered along the way. A videogame may doll you up and call you a knight, but then you end up clobbering chickens for a dozen hours. Is that what knights do? Braid, for example, is all about memory and it conveys this by having you naturally rewind and reattempt each puzzle, always reassessing what you’ve done to figure out how you’ll progress. The potential of a videogame isn’t in words or images, like a book or a movie, it’s in the dynamic rules that tell the player how to participate. And videogames are unique because they can make physical what we understand only abstractly by creating relationships with things normally outside our perception, like time and ecology (or the economy).

When Jonathan Blow sat down in the Firehouse Gallery this past Saturday no one needed to be preached to. Most of the chairs were filled with students studying game design at Champlain College and they were obviously tired of morons making videogames (otherwise they’d be at a party). So after Blow displayed a few sketches of his next game he told them the challenge videogames face if they want to be respected as art. He started with cinema, which took decades to stop treating the screen like a stage. And while most movies still tell infantile stories dressed up in adult themes, there has always been a sliver of serious films that make cinema a vital part of our culture. But comic books, which also began a century ago, never got taken seriously. The industry was too busy scribbling dudes in tights to score kids’ lunch money to consider what potential those

brightly colored panels had. Even with some sterling exceptions (Didn’t Maus win a Pulitzer?) the public considered comics just an adolescent phase. Which is troublesome for videogames because they’ve been labeled “for kids” since the seventies. And the recent success convincing adults to play videogames on the (oh, so aptly named) Wii is by emphasizing how well they keep you occupied rather than, say, emotionally invested. As though videogames are not supposed to be life changing, just part of a distracted routine. (Isn't that routine just like a bad videogame?). And Blow pointed out, all this idiocy has videogames in a narrow box, might as well “push on the boarders and see what we can do.”

Don’t miss local videogame designer RANDY SMITH, Saturday 2/06 at the Firehouse Gallery, where the works of JASON ROHRER, JONATHAN BLOW, RANDY SMITH, PAOLO PEDERCINI, JENOVA CHEN, PETRI PURHO, JAKUB DVORSKY, HEATHER KELLEY, AURIEA HARVEY, MARK ESSEN and MICHAEL SAMYN are on display until February 13th.