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Art Art Feature

Grit and Grace

For his David Lusk exhibition “From Peace Mountain,” Don Estes takes
birch plywood, vinyl spackling, paint, plaster, and graphite and
creates artworks that evoke Barnett Newman’s “zips,” Mark Rothko’s
luminous colors, Kasimir Malevich’s blinding whites, and Claude Monet’s
Impressionism synthesized with such originality that the end result is
unequivocally Estes.

Each of the seven horizontal bands that make up Peace Mounain
6
is a work of art unto itself. The bottom of the painting, for
example, is a haunting piece of Impressionism in which a spring-green
spit of land juts into pale-blue water beneath an overcast sky. The
impastoed strip of white at the top is so textured, sculpted, and
incised, we feel the undercurrent of Estes’ thoughts and feelings even
in the painting’s most understated passage.

A black cloud hovers near the top of Three Days on the
Sylamore
, and a deep-red line abruptly stops at the center of the
work. These elements suggest not only physical but emotional terrain in
which key memories — dark passages, shared passions, and moments
of joy — are reexperienced as Estes creates his art.

Five of the works in the show represent an entirely new direction in
which Estes draws faint lines across the surface of delicately textured
16-by-16-inch squares of plaster created in clay molds. Estes blows
powdered graphite onto the plaster pieces, washing some of it away,
stroking what remains with bare fingers to create endless variations of
white, off-white, and subtly shadowed surfaces. Day flows into day,
sensation into sensation, structure feels less important, and each
nuance is noted.

At David Lusk through November 25th You’ll find a
full range of female forms in John McIntire’s current exhibition at
Perry Nicole Fine Art, including the svelte hips and full bosom of the
dark-walnut sculpture Henry’s Number One Lady, the milky-white,
triple-jointed marble limbs of Georgia, and the Rubenesque
buttocks in McIntire’s limestone torso titled Sandy.

What makes this show one of McIntire’s strongest are the figures
that are quirky and cutting-edge as well as sensual. What looks like
both an oversized phallus and cranium thrusting up from Sandy‘s
derriere suggests the same energy that impassions the body and the
mind. Breasts on top of buttocks on top of craniums in the marble piece
Teresa look totemic, or she could be the talisman of some
ancient shaman summoning all the power in the universe that he can
imagine. Sky Watcher leans slightly forward as she opens herself
up to the universe. Her iridescent white form and small high breasts
look more ethereal than sensual.

The stair-stepped buttocks and mouth spread across a wide face
topped by two mammoth frontal lobes lets us see Valerie from
several angles simultaneously. Like Picasso’s cubist sculpture and
paintings that were inspired, in part, by the discoveries of quantum
physics and Freud’s research into the unconscious mind, McIntire’s
figures appear to be at the edge of some evolutionary leap. His walnut,
marble, limestone, and bronze female forms express every kind of
yearning and raw energy. At Perry Nicole through November
29th

Across hardscrabble landscapes, in the face of death, in spite of
impermanence and pain, Jeri Ledbetter has created a body of work filled
with boundless possibility and an unbridled zest for life in her L Ross
Gallery exhibition, “Mano a Mano II.”

In Tessier’s Bend II, weathered branches work their way out
of underbrush and cross a sometimes arid, sometimes golden-ochre earth,
moving toward a pale-blue patch of sky or pool of water searching for
sustenance and light. The incisive blood-red lines in Sugar Ditch
IV
suggest life’s brambles can cut to the quick, and the
clarion-red morass of vines and veins in La Palma remind us,
like William Faulkner’s novels, that life is full of sound and
fury.

In one of Ledbetter’s most iconic paintings, Cielo II,
charcoal washes coalesce into what looks like the death throes of some
prehistoric beast. In the wild scribbles of graphite lines that arc and
jab across a piercingly blue sky, we feel both the ancient creature’s
and the artist’s rage for life.

Ledbetter is master of the palimpsest as well as the expressive
line. We see traces of former worlds covered over with broad, thick
swaths of pale-gray paint the artist lays down with gusto. Ledbetter
dismisses her inner critics, banishes the fierce demons guarding the
temple door, and gives herself permission to experiment, to fail, to
start anew, to create works of art that, like life, are complex,
uncertain, and achingly beautiful.