LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
ART Around |
by Lee Wayne Mills |
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 Roadan 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 paintingthe dark rocky field, the tree line, the large home and the hillside where it restsdances 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 suggestivea 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 treeseach suggested by a blue swirl of paint, barely more than blobspunctuate 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 DragonPhotographs 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 conveymore 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 realizejust 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 andhow 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. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 13, No. 2, March 7, 2003 |