The new Zwaanendael Gallery of Art at 142
Second Street in Lewes has mounted The National Watercolor Landscape
Exhibit with artist/owner Michael Sprouse acting as curator/juror for
the show. It’s a small exhibition with 15 works by 12 different
artists. Artists from New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, Washington, DC
and Washington State responded to the call for entry.
Some very talented local artists entered
as well, with Dagsboro artist Anne Hanna winning Best in Show with her
entry, On Cooleen Road—an expansive and atmospheric Irish landscape.
Hanna’s masterful play of values (the transitions from light to dark
in a painting) animates her work and gives the piece a choreographic
punch that activates its horizontal bands of activity. Each element of
the painting—the dark rocky field, the tree line, the large home and
the hillside where it rests—dances with an independent spirit, yet
they all come together in support of the whole composition and all very
convincingly painted.
Rehoboth artist Kim Schell is represented
by Country Store, for all intents, a house portrait that asks us to
devise the story of the home’s history. All the evidence is very
engaging and suggestive—a dark and brooding winterscape silhouetting a
bright blue building, which, though overgrown and abandoned, seemingly
invites resurrection and restoration.
Denis Wogan’s watercolor Andalusia is
an amusingly abbreviated and surreal landscape. Fun and funky, its three
windswept trees—each suggested by a blue swirl of paint, barely more
than blobs—punctuate his Spanish plain and presumably catch the rain
from the darkening skies overhead.
Zwaanendael Gallery is a nice addition to
the local art scene. Its intimate and handsome space, sophisticated
lighting and hanging systems, and contemporary edge lend variety and
spice to the mix.
While in Lewes, check out the new
exhibition at Edward Carter Gallery (located in The Inn at Canal Square
on Market Street), Heart of the Dragon—Photographs of the Three Gorges
Area of China by Bill Zorn. There is a quiet power and majesty on
exhibit there that you should really experience. Beyond their technical
and formal skills, these are photographs that carry with them the depth
of experience and resonance of history that a trip to China should/would
convey—more certainly now that this great gorge will soon be under
water, its history and people removed from view, washed away if not
erased by the Yangtze River now dammed to energize the Chinese into the
21st century.
Zorn’s portraits of the people
appropriately capture and reveal them to us and explore the resolute and
iconic qualities we have long associated with this culture but, for my
eyes anyway, his landscapes deliver the compelling story and the
haunting sense of loss that it reveals. It is in them that we
realize—just how beguilingly different and mesmerizing a unique
landscape and topography can be (now gone forever)—how a wall
thousands of years old carries the weight of history into tomorrow
and—how very fine and forbidding is the line that determines our fate.
It is all breathtakingly in focus for us.
Lee
Wayne Mills is a Rehoboth artist who has exhibited in both local and
regional galleries.
|
Back to Top of Page 