See what you want at Muse Gallery

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

By Richard Anderson

The eye sees what it wants to see.

For painter Valerie Stuart, that statement is as much an artistic directive as it is a fact of human nature. The human eye – or maybe the human brain – blocks out certain things and lets in others. So when Stuart creates one of her tonal abstractions, she figures everyone will get something out of it.

And she’s right. Viewing the two dozen or so works now on display at The Muse Gallery, 745 W. Broadway, I admired the sense of motion in what I took for a seascape, the way the color of the “water” deepened, as if the ocean floor suddenly dropped out.

Elsewhere, I noted her subtle sense of perspective as she made the “horizon” roll away.
“They’re not really landscapes,” Stuart said from her home in Sun Valley, Idaho. “I paint minimalist contemporary abstraction … it’s more color and color fields.” But they are color fields planted and grown in a labor-intensive process by a formally trained artist inspired by the land and nature.

When she was a child, Stuart’s father had a stroke. “They didn’t know what to do with me, so they stuck me in the Flemish Art School” in Los Angeles. She later studied fine art at UCLA. For a long time she painted in the classic manner, even going so far as to study fresco painting, Italian finishes, and the ways the Old Masters painted in layers of oil glazes.

“Then one day, I just got tired of it,” she said. “I discovered I’m more about color. I love color!” Six or seven years ago, she abandoned representational painting, for the most part, and started applying the ancient techniques to contemporary abstraction.
“It’s just what artist do,” she said. “Whatever they did in their early years, it shows up later. You take everything you learned and you pray it works.”

It took a long time for Stuart to match a technique to a style that communicated what she wants to say the way she wanted to say it.

“It’s really difficult to create your own thing,” she said. “Once I did, I kept moving along with it. … Now I look at things differently. It’s more fun. It comes out of my head. I can look out my window and see the mountains and do that, but it’s more fun to conceptualize it.”

Today, it takes a long time for her to prepare each canvas she paints. Each one starts with gesso, then several layers of plaster, then a sealer and a bonding material to keep the plaster from cracking.

“Preparing the canvas takes the longest,” she said. “I work on five or six canvases at a time – I can only do certain things on each one every day, I have to constantly move around, let one dry while I work on another.”

Finally, she applies layer after layer of oil. The result is a textured canvas with an ancient, weathered look, but that seems to glow with a light of its own. Even her most minimal works – grids of color, mostly earth-toned with a few reds or greens thrown in, or vertical bands of browns and grays – have richness, depth, even mystery.

“I like lines and boxes,” she said. “There’s just so much you can do with taking a basic thing like that and treating it, making it all about color.”

The Muse Gallery hosts the opening of Stuart’s show, titled “Scotoma,” 5-8 p.m. on Thursday. This will be The Muse’s final show in its West Broadway space; it’s next show, works by Nicole Charbonnet, will open July 1 in the gallery’s new home at 62 S. Glenwood. Contact the gallery at 733-0555.

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  Scott Christensen, Bob Kuhn and Tucker Smith are three of the most popular and collectible painters whose work is included in the permanent collection at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

The museum explores the creative process of the three painters with its new show, “From Sketch to Painting: Scott Christensen, Bob Kuhn and Tucker Smith,” opening Saturday at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Dr. Adam Harris, curator of art at NMWA, notes in museum press materials that if you ask three painters to paint the same thing, the results will of course be very different. Each one sees something different, is attracted to something different, and proceeds toward a completed piece of art differently.

With sketches, field studies and final painting, the new exhibit shows how Christensen, Kuhn and Smith do it.

Kuhn, for instance, sketches a lot. “On occasion,” Harris said, “one of his sketches – based on a life-study, a still from a video, or even a picture from a magazine – will suggest a painting. It may be a certain gesture that intrigues him or a pose he has not yet painted. From the animal comes the painting.”

For Smith and Christensen, it’s often a new vantage point on a lake hillside that suggests a new painting. For Smith, there has to be something in the scene that appeals on an emotional level. Harris notes how Smith’s enthusiasm for nature and wildlife shines through in his final canvases.

Christensen, on the other hand, becomes interested in a scene for a variety of reasons: a pattern in the foliage, a shift in the colors in a stretch of land. When he stumbles upon such a scene, he’ll create drawings and color studies, a “jumping off point for information, not detail,” he said.

For a deeper glimpse into each painter’s process, visit “From Sketch to Painting,” on display through Oct. 14. An opening reception for the show is set for 5:30 p.m. on June 28. Contact the National Museum of Wildlife Art at 733-5771.

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Over the Hill in Teton Valley, Idaho, CIAO Gallery hosts a two-artist show for Andrew J. Best and Dorothy Jankowsky.

Best is a multi-media artist – he paints, makes prints, designs jewelry and also does digital art – who has made his living in Jackson Hole as a Web designer and graphic artist. Recent work runs the gamut: graphic, realistic portraiture, dreamy scenes in which faces and figures hide in clouds, and a number of reiterations of American flags.

Jankowsky started playing with bits of wire in her spare time a few years ago, twisting and bending them into human figures and animal shapes. Since then, she has created her own business, Hay!wire, and shown her deceptively simple wire sculptures at several area art fairs. Whether it’s a climber or a cougar, a deep thinker or a dancer, Jankowsky’s small works, often mounted on river stones found in the area, nail both the energy and the gesture of her subjects.

CIAO Gallery, at 145 N. Main St. in Victor, Idaho, hosts an opening reception for Best and Jankowsky 6-9 p.m. on Saturday with ifood, drink and music. The show runs through June 3. Contact the gallery at (208) 787-4841 or visit www.ciaogallery.com.

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The Art Association of Jackson Hole announces that local students Courtney Cedarholm and Annalee Prindle Neary are the recipients of the 2007 Myles Borshell Memorial and Art Association Visual Arts Scholarships.

These scholarships are awarded to students who have chosen to continue instruction in the visual arts in college. Courtney is a senior at Jackson Hole High School and Anna is a senior at the Jackson Hole Community School.

Myles Borshell was an accomplished Jackson Hole artist and art instructor whose monochromatic paintings have been collected throughout the country.  He always considered art to be a way of reaching others. His family, working with the Art Association, created this annual scholarship to honor Myles, his art and his vision.
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See what you want at Muse Gallery | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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