Walker shares views at Artlab; The Riddells show at Trio; Kingswood and Hood at LMC

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Travis Walker paints landscapes of Jackson Hole as seen in the everyday life of a local person riding a bike, walking down from Snow King mountain or navigating the streets around town square.

He paints tourists in a shocking-pink evening light and shadowy trailers in a sea of gold. He paints hills that are bright lime green or golden on one side and eerily blue on the other.

But the works in Walker’s show, “Views of Jackson,” opening this week at Teton Artlab, can’t be summed up together, because his style has been changing, and the show spans a period of six years.

Walker’s older paintings show some classic Jackson Hole landscapes, but he said his work is becoming less about the token Teton views that he calls “sentimental,” and more about the culture that is growing in the valley and the compelling visual forces it interacts with.

He has been fascinated by the trailers and simple structures that occupy the landscape, so he incorporates them into his new paintings. Walker said he was aesthetically drawn toward buildings, like the old schoolhouse on Hansen, in certain moments of unique light and decided to record them.

“There are these periods of the day when it looks like a bomb went off, and just illuminated everything really intensely for a half hour, or an hour,” he said. But, “it’s not just the light, it’s the objects that the light interacts with” that interest him.
Walker said it is important for local artists to be constantly rethinking their western culture instead of “recycling” the same imagery, like an elk or a Teton vista or a cowboy, that exists in the town’s art market today.

As the owner and principle curator of the Teton Artlab, Walker has represented a burgeoning stable of local artists whose work is mostly abstract and less representational than his own work. He said that bits and pieces of influence have made their way into his work.

See his paintings at a gallery reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, August 1, at Teton Artlab, 135 N. Cache.

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Lee and Ed Riddell have been traveling to Tuscany for the last five years to immerse themselves in the cultural and physical landscape of the Tuscan hill towns.

Ed is a photographer; Lee is an oil painter, and their collection of work from Tuscany, called “Terra Toscana” marks the first time either artist has included people, or even evidence of people, in their art.

Usually both artists focus on natural landscapes but as Ed explained, the natural and human realms in Tuscany are mutually exclusive.

“Every [Tuscan] landscape has had people working it for centuries,” he said. “When everything sort of has a touch of man’s hand, then the trick is to find that artful blend where man and people have added to the environment rather than subtracted from it.”
For Ed, this meant taking both candid and posed portraits, and photographing landscapes with entire cities in them.

For Lee, it meant making small architectural studies of light bouncing off stone walls, and flowers cascading out of window boxes. Lee said she had to learn some new techniques, like starting from canvas covered in terra cotta instead of white to capture the warm feel of otherwise gray stone. Ed said the most difficult part of his work was overcoming his nerves to approach people and ask if he could photograph them.
Both Riddells will have a “conversation” about their experiences at 5 p.m. Thursday, July 31, at Trio Fine Art at 545 N. Cache St. Gelato will be served. Reservations are appreciated for the talk. A reception will follow from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

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Unlike other artists who include images of nature or organic hues to prompt a meditation about nature, Ron Kingswood uses rhythmic scratches and rubs of oil paint and oil sticks on canvas. His gestures and layering of marks are orchestrated into powerful pieces that could engage any viewer.

Barry Hood pours hot glass into logs. The glass burns the wood and creates charcoal textures along the wood’s grain. The final pieces resemble a human organ or swaddled human figure. The textures vary, and Hood adds color in the center of the piece and on the surface to create a unique 3-D image. Their internal complexities are intriguing and eye catching when illuminated by natural light.

Check out Hood’s glass and Kingswood’s paint from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Friday, August 1, at Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary, 130 S. Jackson Street.

Photo by Ed Riddell
Two Tuscan butchers are among the highlights of “Terra Tuscana” with photographs by Ed Riddell (above) and oil
paintings by Lee Riddell (opposite).

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Walker shares views at Artlab; The Riddells show at Trio; Kingswood and Hood at LMC | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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