Letters from Camp Rehoboth

ART Around

Sondra N. Arkin’s first solo exhibition, In Balance, can be seen at the Blue Moon restaurant through November. It is a very promising beginning and the twenty-eight works on display (most of which are sold) are evidence of Arkin’s clever exploration of the many facets of color-field painting she found available. Loosely based on a grid pattern—as we have seen before from her in tightly woven, harder-edged, mixed media metals—these pieces have an open and relaxed nature behaving more like landscapes and actually acting like maps into Arkin’s emotions and affections. With a limited palette—generally a complimentary mix of blues and aquas next to shimmering oranges, sun washed yellows and beach whites—and a squared or nearly square format, Arkin’s grid-like intersections of color and form create the push and pull of classic abstraction reconsidering the natural world. Perhaps inspired by our wonderful Rehoboth beaches, these vistas suggest the desire for Antibes or the promise of Barbados—the colors have heat and the collisions are calypso-esque—not what we find on Poodle Beach but on Frenchman’s Reef. Arkin’s grid can be heavy or light—and that degree also determines the general nature of each piece. Chiamus I & II have multiple intersections of line and color creating a heavier structure to support the paint, they clearly relate to all the works in the show but otherwise acknowledge a kinship to the late, great painter Mondrian that the others lack. The biggest works in the show, In Balance and Crossing, have a looser handling and an easy, sliding grid. They seem the most landscape-like of all with sweeping big spaces filled with light and color and the silhouette of land mass against sea and sky. Rich and romantic, bold and breezy, they harken to the kind of views we get from the contemporary and great Helen Frankenthaler, though she would be loath to be considered a landscape painter! Convincingly breaking with the square format, Elements of Life I - IV, are vertical columns of incident and color, rapturous juxtapositions of deeply hued blues, greens and oranges punctuated by bronze. Fathomless and ethereal, they recall the deepest of seas or the tallest of buildings—or better yet, an artist free falling in infinite possibility. It will be interesting to see what comes next from this artist; perhaps even out of balance.

At Coastal Frameshop and Gallery on the highway, Exposures: A Photographic Group Exhibition features work by eight artists. It’s a handsome little survey of area talent. Of particular note, Roy Boucher’s and Bea Miltenberger’s computer enhanced works really explore the mix of media available to the contemporary photographer, each quite individually exercising a painterly approach to photography. Richard Rhoads’s arresting cibachromes are marvels of classic color photography. And CAMP’s own Fay Jacobs registers with powerful landscapes from Alaska to Provincetown and back to the Broadkill. David Steven’s photography arrives as light-filled and airy sepia-tones of skipjacks and sails or brooding computer-collaged images photographically printed as proof of how well photography can lie. Jane Blue shows landscapes, Pam Montague, her inimitable florals, and I document the depraved mess in my studio after a heavy painting session—abstracts that are real!

In Lewes, Michele Green’s exhibition, Green Delaware at Peninsula Gallery, delivers her impressionistic and painterly views of our state and runs through November 26th. Particularly strong—with moody blue shadows piercing a late golden field—is No Trespassing Road—its dappled lanes leading to the sign in question, unreadable but with its intent clearly blocking the intersection. Evan’s Barn is a wonderful painting with a tautly horizontal composition—its lazy water shimmering in reflection with a barn and shed in high profile on the shore. The painting’s cool, linear left to right axis is punctuated with stop-action clarity that pulls the eye back into the distance and holds us to the painting. Fall Field, one of Green’s simpler works is also one of her best. Its leanness testifies to her painterly skills. An evocative and active under-painting sets the scene for this work—a crisp and breezy late autumn day. The sweep and scent of the scene lies just underneath the paint and the paint itself often thin and wispy, conveys the details of the day. It is small work but large of heart and spirit. One wishes Green could capitalize on her abilities in this respect—playing with changes of scale, allowing small and intimate works to be just that and encouraging others to be much larger still—in allowing her gifted hands to impress with their lyrical nature and assured gesture.

Also in Lewes, Michael Bell’s exhibition at Zwaanendael Gallery is up through December 3rd. Michael’s figurative and expressionistic paintings and drawings—and his book Voices of Violence: A Journey from Wounds to Wisdom need some time to be seen and considered. I suspect each viewer comes away from the show with different perspectives. I need another view myself, but of this much I am sure: there is a very interesting linkage between the more clearly realistic, figurative portraits and the truncated, figuratively expressionistic works often hung like scrolls with aggressive paint gestures revealing facial features. It is as if the cumulative nature of the expressive works eventually coalesce into the more portrait-like ones. The truncated elements of expression become a full face or figure, the gestures and slings of paint become the textural references behind the portraits. Yet we cannot see it all and they cannot (or will not) reveal it all—each remains enigmatic, symbolic of something just beyond reach—or cinematic, something that just passed by and cannot be retrieved—interesting, evocative and even irritating.

Lee Wayne Mills is co-owner of Coastal Frameshop and Gallery, 4284 Highway One, Rehoboth Beach.

LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 13, No. 15 November 26, 2003