Lisa Jennings – Memphis Flyer

Courtesy of Alden Weatherbie

@aldenweatherbie on Instagram: “Sheltered in place with this doodle from @lisajenningsart courtesy of @lrossgallerymemphis. It became an exercise in Photoshop. Layers are fun.”

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso

Laurie Brown, owner of of L. Ross Gallery, hopes to spread this message with the gallery’s online Doodling Around project, featuring doodles drawn by resident artists for the local community to interact with by coloring, either by hand or digitally.

“My goal is to give people a creative outlet,” says Brown. “A lot of people have been stuck at home, and you see them going back to hobbies they used to have or maybe trying something new. And so we just thought Doodling Around was a fun way to keep them engaged with art or let them get back to art and stay busy.”

Brown was inspired to start the Doodling Around project when one of L. Ross Gallery’s artists, Laurel Lukaszewski, posted on Instagram a doodle she’d drawn during a conference call. The doodle became a hit with her followers, who were looking to calm their anxieties with meditative coloring. Brown loved this idea, thinking this was a great way to engage the community. So she asked Lukaszewski if she would be interested in becoming a part of Doodling Around. She agreed, and her work, entitled “Sakura (Cherry Blossom),” became the first doodle to kick off the project.

“And then I just went to the other artists and I said, ‘I think this is a fun idea,’” says Brown. “It keeps people engaged. It gives them something to do. It lets them explore their artistic side again. And so the artists have been sending me doodles to post.”

One such artist, Lisa Jennings, a multimedia artist based out of Nashville, has provided two doodles, one of an owl and the other of a bird resting on a branch, that show her love for nature and the outdoors. When Brown contacted her asking if she’d like to be a part of the project, she was happy to contribute, not knowing that it would wind up giving her some inspiration for her personal work. Colored doodle courtesy of Alden Weatherbie

@aldenweatherbie on Instagram: “@lrossgallerymemphis is feeding our need for art with doodles to color. This one, by @laurellukaszewski was a lot of fun to do on the computer. I’m looking forward to the next one.”

“I’ve kept notebooks and sketchbooks, so I sent her some that I had done some years back,” Jennings says. “But then I started doing new doodles and new sketches. And I’ve actually been creating one and posting one a day for about a week and a half now. And what’s wonderful about these doodles is it’s kind of opening up another part of me, and it’s given me ideas for some things that I want to do with my sculpture.”

Since contributing the two doodles for the Doodling Around project, Jennings says she has been inspired to experiment with her curiosity for Inuit art and has doodled a few whimsical healing masks for viewers to draw faces on to express their moods. “It’s kind of like a release for people to color and then put their own form of expression on the whimsical mask,” she says.

By the time the pandemic is through, Jennings hopes to create a story or a coloring book from her daily doodles. But most of all, she hopes her work will help encourage the community to pursue art and expression themselves.

“I’m trying to do what little I can with my gift to give back and to keep people’s spirits up,” she says. “Art is a necessary thing. It really is. It’s something that has been there for thousands of years, and it will be there even after the pandemic is done. We need art to keep our souls living and alive, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.”

To view doodles featured in Doodling Around, go to lrossgallery.com. Download PDFs, color them, and share them on social media with the tag @lrossgallerymemphis.

In contrast to photorealist painters, plein-air painters use no hard edges. Light is constantly in flux, and trees vibrate with wind. “Path into the Wilderness,” John Torina’s exhibition of 14 large, consummately executed oils on canvas at David Lusk Gallery, captures nature’s endless play of color and light with slashes of pure pigment and passages of blazing impasto that punctuate and energize subtle tonalities and monochromatic color fields.

The Eternal Circle by Lisa Jennings

In the spirit of Monet’s studies, Torina follows the light of the Mississippi River Delta from season to season, from dawn to dusk. In Old River Channel, a band of pale peach is bookended by two stands of leafless trees. The channel’s slow-moving water, the silver-blue sky, the skeletal trees, and the pale, nearly translucent sunset capture the look and feel of a crystalline, cold winter day. In Scarlet Summer and Sunset Over the Delta, Torina captures the fiery temperatures, humidity, and haze of summers. Deep reds (cadmiums, crimsons, and siennas) fill the sky, tint the vapors above the river, and reflect off large swaths of the wet Delta lowlands.

At David Lusk Gallery through February 24th

George Shaw’s Study for Poet’s Day

For 26 days during the summer of 2006, Lisa Jennings hiked the west coast of Ireland near Galway. And she painted — producing a body of work that constitutes “Threshold,” the exhibition at L Ross Gallery.

In her previous shows, ghostly figures, black ravens, and white doves were often superimposed on ethereal dreamscapes. Painting the Irish landscape on site has taken Jennings to a whole new level of art-making. Her mixed-media paintings are rich with the colors and textures of Ireland: the deep-purple heather, the red jasmine, and the infinite greens of the rolling hills. They are rich with ancient iconography as well, recording sites of ritual, stargazing, and burial, where prehistoric peoples erected large stone megaliths and circles of standing stones.

Jennings’ new work is also filled with personal symbolism. In Crossing the Unknown Sea, one of the standing stones morphs into the silhouette of a woman standing in a shallow sea, her feet planted on the ocean floor, her head turned to the right and gazing out to sea. Next to the figure is a curragh, an open boat covered with hide, which transported the ancients and their megaliths between coastal islands. This curragh, whose golden oars nearly touch the luminous figure, stands ready to carry a visionary artist deeper into the Irish landscape, deeper into the mind-set of millennia of humans burying their dead, studying the movement of the stars, attempting to understand the universe.

At L Ross Gallery through February 24th

Since childhood, George Shaw has sketched and painted his birthplace, Coventry, England, and is internationally noted for his meticulously rendered paintings. For his exhibition “A Day for a Small Poet,” however, Shaw quickly executed 19 enamel paintings on small pieces of cardboard, which are tacked to the walls of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. This format is poignantly apropos for a body of work in which the remains of an ancient forest and 15th-century graveyards stand alongside strip-mall shops, prefabricated housing, and abandoned garages.

In one of the untitled works, a huge tree trunk, decayed on the forest floor for centuries, is surrounded by litter from a nearby housing complex. Study for Lychgate depicts eroding medieval gravestones and the gate where the dead were laid beneath shrouds (only the well-to-do could afford coffins) until the priest performed last rites. The exhibition’s most provocative work, Study for Poet’s Day, is a weathered, blood-spattered garage in Tile Hill, the public housing complex in Coventry that has gained the reputation of being one of the roughest places in the U.K.

“A Day for a Small Poet” is a fitting title for a show in which a respected painter returns to sketching and to his roots. This body of work pays homage not to the rich or famous but to small poets — like the talented youngster who lived with his working-class parents in Tile Hill housing and honed his artistic skills sketching the buildings and trees of Coventry.

At Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, through February 21st