Viewing page 28 of 39

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

THE RICHMOND NEWS LEADER, Saturday, October 6, 1990 A-42

ART
Huge clay sculptures star at Hand Workshop

ART & LIFE
By Roy Proctor
[[image]]

Whatever happened to the modest clay pot? It seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird, at least in cutting-edge craft exhibitions, but no one is likely to complain when confronted with the three massive clay sculptures — one weighs 600 pounds — by New York ceramist Arnold Zimmerman at the Hand Workshop.

"Arnold Zimmerman: Clay Sculpture," which opened yesterday, center on three free-standing sculptures that suggest objects used in ancient ritual. Their tangle in imagery — serpent shapes, for example, for foliage forms — denotes representation in the act of becoming. Their resonance — and thus their potential for varied interpretation — is immense.

Zimmerman, who is making his Richmond exhibition debut, is also represented by 11 staffs, called "Kohler needles," that lean against a wall and seven tiles affixed to an adjoining wall. The form of these objects is quite different from Zimmerman's free-standing sculptures, for which he is best known, but the spirit is much the same.

Although it is in a separate Hand Workshop gallery, "Susan Iverson: Tapestries," which also opened yesterday, deals in much the same sort of timeless imagery, only in wool. Ms. Iverson, the Richmond artist who won 1989 Virginia Prize in Craft, is no stranger to Richmond gallerygoers.

The six recent tapestries on view deal in the same exacting sense of craftsmanship and the same delight in contrasting colors and shapes - especially frondlike forms with jagged edges - that have established her stylistic signature in the past. However, the colors seem brighter and some of the contrasts are even more surprising this time out.

The Zimmerman and Iverson shows, which will remain on view through Nov. 17 in the Hand Workshop at 1812 W. Main St., were only two of a number of exhibitions that opened here yesterday. Also encountered on an afternoon gallery-hopping jaunt were:

[[image]]
"Hillside," an acrylic painting by Hanover Courthouse artist Ed Taylor, is part of "Cycles of Place," the two-artist show at Artspace.

"New Faces '90" at 1708 East Main through Oct. 27.
In an exhibition format that promises to be repeated, seven 1708 artist-members have chosen seven young and relatively unknown artists - six from Richmond, one from Fredericksburg - who, in the words of the exhibition checklist, "are beginning to produce interesting work."

The results are mostly small-scale, often derivative, occasionally novel. In Richard Marshall's expressionistic paintings, buildings frequently buckle and melt like Gaudi's in Barcelona, Spain. Lori Ellison places figures in highly original contexts.

Chris Gregson has produced an installation in which painted plywood "slabs" suggest some prehistoric ritual ground. Lora Beldon's drawings are witty and nicely assured. Didi Farnhold revels in pop imagery - juxtaposing a paper-doll dress against the Statue of Liberty against a background of glitter, for example.

Sarah Johnson's oil studies of heads are on wood supports so thick that they seem like painting equivalent of relief sculpture. Georgia Myers' oil works on wood, paper and canvas revel in odd shapes and frames made of newspaper and chicken wire. One untitled Myers painting of a blue jacket on a yellow chair obviously pays homage to Van Gogh.

The works in "New Faces '90" are so various that the show, as a whole, says nothing more than that these seven young artists indeed are artists whose development merits watching.

. "Cycles of Place" at Artspace, 2 1/2 N. 18th St., through Oct. 28.
Hanover Courthouse artist Ed Taylor is the star of this two-man exhibition.  Taylor's 17 paintings, mostly landscapes, are in two different styles.  "Checkers," for example, denies gesture in its patchwork application of paint to portray two beer-drinking men playing a board game.
"Prospect Hill," on the other hand, is a nearly monochromatic landscape that revels in the brush stroke, which leads a life of its own.  Taylor is at his best in those works which, like "Prospect Hill," brings his instinctive sense of color and form into felicitous play.  His "Frosty Morn" is especially bracing.
Richmonder Mike Page's five figurative painted-wood sculptures seem somewhat lost amid Taylor's robust array.  Page's figures, which make some sort of social or political comments, are assertively frontal.  The most arresting, "Spring Street, 11 pm.," which is also the smallest, spawns a host of interpretative possibilities in its two nude figures in states of emotional stress.

."Recent Paintings: Larry Wheeler and Steven Wolf" and "Debra Rogers" at Cudahy's Gallery, 1314 E. Cary St., through Oct. 31.
Etlan artist Wolf's 10 alkyd resin paintings of mountain landscapes are arresting indeed.  They glow with magical inner lights.  The palette is rich and surprising.  Wolf is especially effective in his use of violet and other arbitrary colors as outlines for geological and botanical motifs rendered mostly in rusts and other earth tones.

Glencoe, Md., artist Wheeler's eight landscapes in oil, most including figures or groups of cattle or horses, also are assured, but conceived in such traditional landscape terms that they pale in distinction when compared with Wolf's work.  Ms. Rogers, who hails from Norfolk, exhibits a sense of humor so highly honed that you may burst out laughing while viewing her zany ceramic creations.

."Norman Parish" at the Last Stop Gallery, 1718 E. Main St., through Oct. 31.
Parish, who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., but is identified largely with the years he spent in Chicago, is represented by 17 paintings, mostly landscapes.  He delights in continuing a landscape image through as many as four canvases that are separately frames and hung side by side.  His use of color - light, yet strangely rich - gives his vision an ethereal air that is especially beguiling.