Eager to Please with Some Pleasant Surprises - 85th Annual Hoosier Salon
originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal July 18, 2009
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Many Hands, Fred Doloresco, 2009 Best of Show, 85th Annual Hoosier Salon |
Classics, Penny French-Deal’s small oil was the first picture to capture my attention. The painting is nostalgic in its entirety. Its brushwork is impressionist, as is favored by most painters in the exhibition. The subject is a small town street of yesteryear. Arched windows and quaint awnings compose the turn of the century facades. Depression-era automobiles line the curb in colors bright enough to cheer up our modern memories of that sepia-toned era — candy apple red and a shiny royal blue.
Garden Chores by Ronald Mack is also an amalgamation of entirely nostalgic elements. Some charming farm girls dressed as in the 19th Century — either inspired from sometime else, formed from the artist’s imagination or maybe staged as a fussy tableau that Mack painted from life. The young ladies stroll through a vegetable garden, between the split rails, in the foreground of a slope-roofed farmstead shack through the long shadows of a setting sun.
Kathleen McMurray’s Pears with Blue and White Vase is composed not only of the namesake fruit and ubiquitous Japanese blue and white vessel, but also a marvelously rendered pewter spoon. The oil painting salutes Dutch still life masterfully, but that is as far as it goes.
Two award winning paintings hanging near one another reveal the eye of the jurors at play. Bahama Breezes by Denise Pettee-Frazier and Lifting Skies by David Tutwiler both exhibit a loose, sensual gauze of brushwork and a subject matter that inspires happy fuzzy memories of sunny holidays.
Snowy Day on Washington Street by Chris Newlund showcases the artist’s engaging and deft handling of the brush. The painting’s subject is sweet and is seductive almost to the point of being cringe-worthy, like Auguste Renoir can be at times. The chair barely exists at the painting’s edges, as the artist skillfully propels the viewer’s attention to the drama of the scene — a pregnant clump of grapes about to splash the coffee cup.
An idiosyncratic vision is displayed in the folk art collage by Ed McEndarfer, Storm Over Paradise. Decoration for decoration’s sake really — one motif is a line of Indiana-looking trees interspersed with half hidden palms.
William Lawson’s Autumn Shallows captures a natural moment of expressionist color — the bright oranges, deep blues and paling greens of an Indiana lake side in October. Despite the active color scheme, Lawson achieves an almost Chardon-like calm and harmony with the painting. The painting’s realism is all the more apparent with the nearby hanging of Marianne Glick's Abstract I. Glick’s abstract shares the same expressionist's colors but presents them to provoke a jagged and jarring effect, quite the opposite intention of the serene scene painted by Lawson.
The big, rolling bend of Lynn Dunbar’s Mighty Ohio River is painted of similar expressionist colors, shared also by her other entry, Little Pink Houses, Alton. This artist seems to utilize the colors in a more premeditated manner, as both pictures use them the same. But maybe the artist caught both scenes at a similar moment of light.
Virtuoso performances are awarded with the palette knife oil by Beth Forst, Cornrows Below Zero, and the pastel industrial impression and gossamer handling seen in The Ethanol Plant by Carol Strock-Wasson.
Dan Woodson has a sense of humor, I imagine. His My Summer Home begins at first glance as a visual riddle. The scene is a seek and find of the picture’s subject amid the visually busy and interesting monochrome crosshatching woodland branches that act a Cy Twombly camouflage. Woodson’s summer place is a tree house, with requisite swinging tire hanging from a branch, all covered in winter snow.
C. J. Fang’s Expressive Tranquility, not surprisingly, expresses tranquility. I found the composition of the acrylic painting to be among the most beautiful in the exhibit. The shapes of the clumps of marsh grass — the sky indivisible with the crystal still water. The golden ripe and fresh green shoots.
I wanted to enjoy the fabric collage Chicago, N. Michigan Ave. by Joel Fremion more. However, the work affected me less due to the inclusion of the word Prudential on a skyscraper and the composition’s starting point, the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and the pre-fab drama of its stone lion.
By my count, there are thirteen pictures of the traditional ‘winding road’ genre all hung together on a section of wall. However, one work among them displays an unexpected turn. To state it simply, Alan Patrick’s Winding Road doesn’t. He’s painted a winding road stripped of all nostalgia and pre-packaged charm. It’s just a typical Indiana 3-way stop. A ‘T’ intersection. As if the blunting top of the ‘T’ wasn’t enough to frustrate a winding road, the stark left/right choice is further obscured by the heavy shade of the overhanging treeline.
Pamela Denny-Rohrbach’s Bittersweet, Vanitas I expresses joy. A joy in painting, a joy in the objects and color of life, a joy in living. She’s composed a still life that’s a roller coaster of movement similar to some of Cezanne’s lopsided cornucopias. Her approach contains no shortcut. All included is intricate and wild. The shrinking jagged oak leaves, an almost obscenely decorative fabric tumbling from the table in a myriad of folds, complicated oriental porcelain, an odd King Neptune fruit bowl.
The 2009 ‘Best of Show’ is Fred Doloresco’s Many Hands. Doloresco’s skills as a painter are marred a bit by the overwhelming nostalgia of his subject. Even the picture's framing seems to aspire to imitate an earlier age. The result, unfortunately, is somewhat gaudy and overly sentimental to my tastes — a mash of Milet’s L’Angelus and similar pictures with Monet's haystacks, all in a picture frame fit for a king. The picture’s scale is admirable. Indeed it shares the ambitious size seen in the works that make up the Society of Western Artists exhibit showing concurrently down the hall. The picture’s painterly effects can entertain, to be sure, if you stand nice and close. But at a distance, Doloresco’s harvest peasants have become too familiar to excite all that much.
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