More…
These artists add energy, color, and even layers, expanding the impact of paintings and photographs that show “more can be more.”
Ann Lofquist's extreme panorama format invites us to survey the tableau edge to edge, inspecting the sycamores' crowns, gesturing trunks, and fallen limbs splayed across the slender panel. Her quick, short strokes indicate the details of foliage and, above all, evidence of her day spent painting in San Simeon.
Manny Lopez emphasizes energy and color in this hazardous view of rocks and foaming water at the base of the bluff.
Rich colors form the cliff, rocks, and ocean. Brisk brushstrokes capture the splashing tidal surge, invoking a Romantic era awe for the perils of nature—seen through the lens of a plein air painting.
Marcia Burtt trades detail for big brush gestural verve that fills the entire canvas. The line of trees syncopates rhythmically from violet shadows to golden highlights. She expands the idyll, reflecting the blue sky and leafy canopy on the canal’s surface.
Helen Ward's subject is the botany of liminal landscapes in St. Ives, Cornwall: patches of brush and grass on the way to somewhere else, details of details of a larger view. She builds her paper lithography prints by layering processes. Ward starts with a drawing or a photograph, then prints, and then draws over the print. Textures, tones, and lines emerge, creating poetry from the overlooked.
Anne Ward's Early Spring in the Yard is an ode to repetition. The phyllotaxy of petals, segments of lemon, stripes on can and tablecloth, and the titular season are copies and echos of a previous occurrence. Through patterns on patterns, Ward elevates the beauty of life's motifs.
Finding the creek in Randall David Tipton's Oswego Creek takes a moment. Hidden by vegetation and rocks, patches of smooth water mirror the sky through grasses and leaves. Tipton's dense brushwork and sgraffito lines fill the painting. He prunes the flora with the edges of the canvas, acknowledging he can't contain the teaming life of the riparian habitat.
Susan Petty's title Wild Sunflowers could refer to the Helianthus annuus or the character of the flowers crowding the canvas. The inflorescences' golden hippy hair petals fly above stems and olive green leaves, wildly dancing against an electric green sky.
Bill Dewey's Delta series is a maximalist production. Photographed through the window of his Cessna, spanning more than thirty years and thousands of miles, these enormous photographs offer a counterpoint to our small-screen lives.
