Kingswood ventures into unknown; Alleman brings spirit to bronze vessels

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

By Susan Burkitt

One might presume that an artist finds his or her genre and sticks with it, perhaps changing palette with mood or focusing on different elements in a landscape – trees versus skies, etc.

This week, Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary brings us an accomplished artist, Ron Kingswood, who readily states that at this stage of his career, he is simply “moving into the unknown.”

At 6 p.m. today, Kingswood and Bob Moeller, formerly of the  Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and now a private art curator living locally, will present a discussion, “An Artist in Transition,” that describes the quest an artist embarks on as he or she feels pulled away from known art influences and processes that guided their work. Kingswood decribes the feeling as “restless and exciting – needing to go beyond nothing, shedding the known influences.”

Kingswood’s interest in the landscape began in childhood when he would wander the woodlots and meadows of northern Ontario, Canada. “My time in the classroom was uncomfortable,” Kingswood said, “while I was always comfortable outside.

“At 47 years old,” he continued, “I can still wander the meadows and the landscapes, but the work is more allegorical than representational. I don’t see art as linear.”
His new show, which will hang alongside new work by renowned contemporary landscape painter Theodore Waddell, offers a glimpse at the “more wordless, silent paintings” he has moved toward – with animals and trees at times completely removed from the landscape, leaving just the minimal elements that appear as sticks or slashes on the canvas.

“Minimal is what landscape is all about to me,” Kingswood said.
His work, often measuring well over six feet in height, attempts to capture the scale of that open landscape.

Waddell, a former third-generation cattle rancher originally from Laurel, Mont., is also a native to the open spaces reflected in his artwork. He was mentored and taught at Eastern Montana College in Billings, Mont., by Isabelle Johnson, Montana’s first modernist painter, who was influenced by post-Impressionism, especially Cezanne. Like Johnson before him, Waddell shied away from Western realism from the start and paints highly textured cattle, horses and landscapes with smudged edges and abstract colors, daring the viewer to see more than what is on the canvas.

Waddell studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, has an MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich., and taught at the University of Montana from 1968 to 1976.  He first received national attention when his work appeared in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Second Western State Exhibition in 1983, and he has been a much sought-after painter ever since by collectors, including the Denver Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This latest show, opening with an artists’ reception at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, brings together the work of two painters who paint what they see or have seen on a daily basis, although not in any way representational or expected.  Drop by Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary, 130 S. Jackson St.

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Meyer-Milagros Gallery will debut a new sculpture by Carol Alleman at a reception 6-8 p.m. Thursday to celebrate the opening of  “Vision & Alchemy: Carol Alleman & Cary Henrie,” which will hang until July 31. The piece, entitled, “Gingko” is a slim 18.5 inch bronze vessel with a male gingko tree intertwined in golden autumnal color and accompanied by three doves, symbols of peace and the traditional feminine, as Alleman explains in her accompanying text. Alleman also includes the poem, “Gingko: Seed of Hope,” that touches on war and separation and finding peace by letting go.

“Through its rhythmic shedding, year after year, seemingly without notice, we might all be invited to seasonally look at ourselves in terms of what we might shed without hesitation,” Alleman writes, describing the gingko’s sudden shedding of leaves in autumn as an “unreserved surrender – as if in one huge, deep breath.”

“Gingko” is similar to the self-taught artist’s other work in its intricate, lacy structure, a feat of some magnitude given that the artist is working in bronze, said Meyer-Milagros owner Mariam Diehl. “Alleman is the ‘Alchemy’ half of the show,” Diehl said, “because she transforms a base metal into something beautiful.”

Alleman will be showing other work from her “Tree of Life” series, all vessels – with one exception – that pay homage to a variety of trees, from aspens to oaks.
Alleman’s work comes from a very spiritual viewpoint – not surprising given her graduate studies in theology. She will talk about the particular rationale behind her art, and the “Tree of Life Series,” starting at 6 tonight at the gallery, 155 Center Street.

The “Vision” half of the show is provided by Cary Henrie, a Utah native educated at the Pratt Institute in New York City.  Henrie’s work reflects the many hours he spent “haunting” the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Diehl said, in that they have an aged, Italian look, almost decayed-looking, especially in the “framing” that Henrie places around his landscapes that appear as a distant vision. 

“I really try to capture a symbolic or time-weathered scene or landscape with an abstract sensibility,” the artist states about his work.

What Henrie’s work has in common with the older artworks is that he takes the viewer someplace else, Diehl said.

See the artwork and meet the artists at Meyer-Milagros Gallery, 155 Center Street.

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Also tomorrow, Muse Gallery opens “John Felsing: Dammerung (Twighlight)” in its new space at 62 S. Glenwood.  Felsing, a Michigan native, paints from the same rural setting where he has lived for over 20 years.

“I find freedom in all the years I have walked over the same fields,” Felsing writes in his artist’s statement.

Felsing views his work as “portraits, or abstractions, or music” and not necessarily as landscapes.

His ethereal works will hang until Aug. 7. Call the gallery at 733-0555.

Courtesy
Takken In Het Bos, oil on canvas, 100 x 90, Ron Kingswood 2005

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