In “Veda Reed: Keep Looking Up,” the current exhibition at David
Lusk Gallery, Reed demonstrates her mastery of glazed skyscapes as she
takes us on a journey across large, luminous Midwestern skies to
intimations of immortality to transcendence tinged with terror.
Color and tone seamlessly gradate from glowing lavender to deep
purple to midnight blue to a nearly black but still luminous sky
accented with a slender white arc above a single point of light in
Venus and the Crescent Moon. Nearly transparent swaths of
yellow-gold fade into softly glowing mauve in Clouds at Sunset,
and ember-orange puffs hover in a blood-red sky in Gathering
Clouds.
In addition to painting scenes of great natural beauty, Reed uses
skyscapes as a metaphor for the afterlife and for the
apocalypse. In Golden Clouds (Heaven’s Gate for “Beaver”),
narrow slits of light pierce a burnt-umber sky. A semifigurative,
stair-stepped bank of white-gold clouds fills the top left of the
painting. Painted in remembrance of her mother, Golden Gate
stands as a poignant metaphor for the felt presence of deceased loved
ones, for memories that can suddenly well up and cut to the quick and
for that broader connection we feel when someone we love passes through
heaven’s gate.
Instead of a picture-postcard sunset, Three Black Clouds
looks like the heads of large serpents or dark spirits or fierce
Buddhist deities closing in from all sides as they swallow up the sun
and sky. In Day’s End, a glowing red sun falls down the
center of a long, lean deep-blue canvas toward a pitch-black
abyss. Both transcendent and terrifying, these two paintings take
us into a vision not just of end-times but an ongoing apocalypse of big
bangs and black holes. Reed invites us to the dance of Shiva where
universes are continually created and destroyed.
Through
October 31st
Anne Davey’s exhibit of “New Work” at Perry Nicole
Fine Art captures both the outward appearance and the inner experience
of swimming underwater. Many of her figures look as fluid,
sinuous, and weightless as the undulating bodies of jellyfish. The
expression of the woman in Davey’s charcoal-on-gessoed-paper
Spin captures the look of a swimmer lost in her underwater world
as well as the focus required to navigate that world’s currents and
waves.
Veda Reed, Three Black Clouds, at David Lusk Gallery
Countless subtle but satisfying touches include the young swimmer
who grasps her right ankle in Girl Underwater in a gesture that
looks like a movement in an underwater ballet. But Davey goes far
beyond the lyrical to create a postmodern dance that is undulating,
inventive, ambiguous, and unsettling.
Part human, part sea creature, part phantom, Girl Underwater
folds into herself, refracting and distorting her body to the point
that her right arm is reed-thin. Her right foot — broad,
flat, and as large as the rest of her leg — shape-shifts into a
paddle that can propel her body through the water and slap the surface
to warn of danger. A black shadow obscures the rest of her body
except for the sunlight that plays across her tiny, almost featureless
face.
Icy Depths 2 by Mary Long-Postal, at Perry Nicole
Davey’s fluid lines and forms extend beyond the water into the
bedroom. For example, the oil-on-board Under the Covers 1 is
dominated by a large, light-gray comforter that billows and folds back
like the waves in this artist’s waterscapes.
Through October
31st
Mary Long-Postal’s encaustic paintings, also at Perry
Nicole, work as expressive abstractions and evocative
cityscapes. Rectangles floating across modulated color fields
suggest the artist’s sensations as she cruises through drizzling rain
past saturate swatches of color in billboards that dot the
landscape.
Nearly transparent white rectangles float across her panels like
illuminated department-store windows in New City 1 and frigid
air in Icy Depths 2. Translucent layers of smoky gray look like
the haze of humidity and pollution in New City 2, palimpsests of
mind in Foggy Memory 3, and the haze of an even more atmospheric
centuries-old city along the Seine in Paris 3.
Add pink to the palette, childlike drawings of homes, and inventive
linework and Long-Postal’s layers of translucent beeswax provide
glimpses into the artist’s playful and passionate emotional makeup in
My Blood Runs Strawberry Quik 1.
The largest work in the show, Toto’s Geographical Cure Nearly
Killed Us All, reveals Long-Postal’s range of vision as her
signature gray background is replaced by five square feet of a luminous
Kansas sky. Outlines of tiny houses and larger ramshackle structures
remind us of the frailty of human architecture compared to the forces
of nature. This is the light before the storm, before Long-Postal
increases her cruising speed to warp-drive and hurls Toto and Dorothy
past all of earth’s farmsteads and cityscapes into Oz.
