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Awe Free Couch, Brian Fick |
Soul Refreshing.
Painter Brian Fick exhibited a large group of relatively recent art work at Edington Gallery in Indianapolis in May. Called Hint of Sublimity, the show presented colorful acrylic paintings on luan panels,of various sizes. Some of the works have custom and painted frames of Fick's design and decoration, and all have bronze plaque nameplates providing the title of each piece.
A first time visit revealed Edington Gallery, on the city's near northwest-side, as an exceptional place that provides an ideal, museum-like setting for artwork.
White walls, nondescript floor, well-lit in a symmetrical spacious layout with high ceilings. It's really a perfect gallery of a type seldom seen and there is something refreshing and invigorating about seeing art so expertly presented.
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Hint of Sublimity, Brian Fick, partial installation at Edington Gallery |
Fick's paintings bloom and beam among the four pristine walls. They certainly present more than a hint of a certain something in the space.
Sublimity is defined as the quality of being extremely excellent, majestic or beautiful – often describing a feeling or state that transcends ordinary greatness, inspiring deep emotion, reverence, or awe.
It is a word often associated with the Romantic Era in art, and landscape painters such as J. M. W. Turner and Albert Bierstadt, as well as in the music of Beethoven and many well known writers and poets. That emotionally energized era, if not an inspiration, is not alien to Fick's art.
His paintings are at times moody, expressionistic and gorgeously decorative. Some gush and ooze a rainbow of color. Many bask in a brightness of sky, infused by a changing light. One or two glower in a disorienting atmospheric darkness.
That is to say of the lot, a wide range of feelings are inspired in glancing upon and across Fick's paintings – sensations from intimate to overwhelming, in pictures from small to large.
Life Itself Among the Gates.
One picture above all, is immense. It is a showstopper size with a beautiful and foreboding presence and dwarfs the surrounding works.
Fortress of Solicitude portrays a somewhat modest Edwardian house in a somewhat robust manner – in a decorative, elegant style befitting the Sun King at Versailles.
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Fortress of Solicitude, Brian Fick |
We have a symmetrically perfect house. If it is not painted yellow in color, then it is bathed in golden light. We have pink light at the level of the building's first floor. On the second, we have a stained glass arched window pointed upwards, toward the heavens, by way of lightning rod.
Beyond the house, a metallic gate of delightfully fussy intricacy, reflecting both the pink and gold. It seems a fence, a protective presence. Not around the house, but below, and aside, and above.
Whether a gate or fragile fence, it extends delicately from the house at the picture's center to the edge of the artwork's large frame. It is a hand-painted incorporation of picture and frame in what we now recognize as the Brian Fick manner. It is seen in several paintings in the show, and in numerous works by him in the past. The manner of his decorative spell enchants and entertains and succeeds.
Maybe it's a sly post-modern questioning of when a painting truly becomes a painting, or where a picture starts and where it ends. It's not a dry scholarly inquiry that Fick posits with this device of his style, but rather a lavish and poetic quibble to ponder in the heavenly corners of a daydream.
A wonderful conundrum observing itself like Ralph Waldo Emerson, lounging on the morning grass, imaging the universe in a single drop of dew, or the other way around.
Aesthetic Layers of Pattern.
The grid-like decoration, be it fence, or gate, or mere artifice, is a fundamental component in most all of Fick's paintings in the show.
Sometimes it is a sedimentary layer in his painting, a foundational framework beneath providing a firmness of structure, an almost hidden strength, and only eroded to the surface, in places.
Other times, it is the uppermost layer that acts as a fence or a stylized filter separating the viewer from the painting beyond.
Rarely, but at times, it is a compositional devise unto itself, added to a picture like any other item of still life or object of interest in a landscape scene.
Two pictures of the beyond type are Asinicide and Etude for Pedolin and Eructations. Both portray a rolling landscape of empty hills and dramatic sundown skies. The portraits of these landscapes, transitioning from day to night, are viewed through a screen of filigree.
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Etude for Pendolin and Eructations, Brian Fick |
In Etude it is as if you are looking out into the distant fields through a wall that has dissolved. Well...all but dissolved. The only part of the wall that remains is a specter of its wallpaper pattern.
Asinicide is overrun by organic forms in the picture and the frame. It has a medallion-like grate of curves and curlicues that circle over the landscape from the center outward. It's bordered by a rough hewn frame with corners further decorated with carved wooded leaves.
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Asinicide, Brian Fick |
Whereas the circular pattern in this painting may actually be an earlier level of work, it appears on top. The various washes of color are so thinly painted, that the pattern survives the entirety of the surface.
The maple leaf-shaped pendants at the outermost reach of the picture's corners seem to symbolize the never ending patterns of nature that reach out from the smallest point of creation to the end of all its cosmos.
Two paintings of the beneath type are Dichrous Batrachos and The Dyeing of the Lite.
In the latter, a Big Sur sort of gnarly landscape bellows in the sun. Grass and rock, foam and sky, cloud and sea can be ascertained in the tumult of the scene.
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The Dyeing of the Lite, Brian Fick |
Remnants of orangish pattern surround a central rocky peak and radiate toward the viewer like coagulated clots of sunspecks frozen in mid-flight.
In Dichrous Batrochos, a decorative pattern leaches stealthily above the rolling horizon of a strange landscape hedge of huge flowerheads.
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Dichrous Batrachos, Brian Fick |
The thick impasto at the bottom half of the painting contrasts in color, and dynamism with slightly patterned yellow sky and full moon above. The pattern, here, serves as a slight vertical bracing to a mostly horizontal view.
The small painting, Pizza Resistance, is of the final type, and seems a study in parts.
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Pizza Resistance, Brian Fick |
A bronze-colored daisy pattern hovers above a bed of pink and orange stones. The golden radius of the well-defined flower dominates the picture plane, as your brain tries to make sense of the contrast of an indigo area aside and atop a hot orange Rorschach test. The molten blob is itchingly abstract and surreal at the bottom right of the painting.
Isolative Darkness.
A couple paintings in the show are relatively dark and sober, even somber, in comparison to the exultant fiesta of color seen in most of the works.
Shadows and shaded clouds shroud the hills in Villa Belmonte.
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Villa Belmonte, Brian Fick |
Fick uses a deep purple pattern of lattice over the entire picture to further cloak the scene in mystery.
There is light in the picture, but not before the darkness. It exists beyond it, high up on the edge of clouds.
The romantics merged with modernists in transitional artists like Albert Pinkham Ryder of Massachusetts and Dorothy Morlan, of Indianapolis, a hundred or more years ago. These in-between artists used darkness as a symbol for something open-ended and vast and excitedly unknowable.
Fick uses a predominately cool palette only rarely in the show, but is effective when he does. Besides Villa, he embarks into the deep with his painting The Froth of Two Streams Joining.
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The Froth of Two Streams Joining, Brian Fick |
Again, in the ebb tide of transition, when day merges into night, when structure dissolves into chaos, in that place where an imprisoning fence hints of hope and deliverance at the foot of a divine gate, we find Brian Fick painting.
And what are we seeing as Fick dims our vision?
Are we a bird, above it all? Soaring above the danger of a cliff, and its jagged point? Maybe in such darkness, the fear of flying is rendered more meaningless amid the sound of pounding surf, and the beauty from a vantage point so high.
Fick paints a purple night and the moonlight shadows where two rivers become one in froth, and it's amazing to behold.
But again, it begs the question, not only in this painting but all of Fick's works in the show.
What is it we are seeing that is so beautiful, yet so cordoned off. So almost there, within arm's reach but somehow off limits?
What is that place beyond the fence and gate, and that gate outside the place? Nature or heaven, or one in the same?
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