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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 9, 2003)
BY SYLVIE PEDERSON Western Dimensions Claywork at Clarke, paintings at Alder N o other material is as versatile as clay, whether used for functional purposes — from bricks to porce- lain tea services — or as an art medium. The diversity in the latter is on show at the Karin Clarke Gallery. Gil Harrison, curator and ceramicist from Cottage Grove, chose non-utilitarian or sculptural work of nation- al quality by professional artists never before viewed in this community. Thirteen West Coast artists each bring about a differ- ent sensibility and style. Lyn Sedlak-Ford’s (Portland) recent “paintings in clay” depict cozy interiors with windows opening onto cityscapes or landscapes. A cat, books, flowers contribute to the impression of peaceful, domestic scenes, yet the paintings are filled with vitality and movement because of the high- ly textured surfaces — her skies and fields are clear references to Van Gogh — and bright raku glazes. Sedlak-Ford also plays with depth per- spective: She juxtaposes two-dimensional illusion of depth with three-dimensional carving without necessarily coordinating the two so that the latter sometimes contra- dicts the former. For instance, in Midnight Snack, the moon and buildings outside the window jut into the room and are on the same plane as the flowers on the table. In other pieces, the scenery comes through the windowpanes into the interior and toward the viewer. Somehow it all works and only enlivens the pictures. Some of the hand- carved slabs are framed with raku-fired tiles; others are unframed, playful free- forms. The show provides varied examples of clay sculpture. Katy McFadden’s art is fig- urative in a suggestive rather than mimetic way. The Current Regime: Five Pieces shows a group of figures whose massive bodies and tiny heads bitingly implies swollen egos, inflated importance, and lack of thoughtfulness in current politicians. “As an artist,” says McFadden (Portland), “my role is to witness the events of my time and how they affect society, family, friends and the environment.” Her hand-built, monu- mental figure, The Ancient One, gazes up into the distance. Her face, smiling and serene, is merely outlined, leaving it to the viewer to fill in details. James Robinson (Phoenix, Ore.) creates coil-built forms of essential simplicity, either stylized or abstract, and uses sintered matte glazes so that no gloss detracts from form. Despite the ascetic spareness, sensu- ality is retained, especially in the most abstract pieces, with their fullness of form and suggestion of fertility: Creation Form, sienna-colored, is reminiscent of a bulging seedpod cracking open along one side, while Gemini, a wall-piece, consists of twin seed forms in a red earth tone. Victoria Shaw (Portland) creates totems out of large numbers of modular pieces stacked together. Coiled or thrown, they vary in size and shape — spherical, pyram- idal or disk-like. Dark colors textured with hatchings alternate with pieces in smooth blue, green, or shiny metallic glazes. One of the totems features gleaming ball bearings telling a haiku poem in Braille. Jim Koudelka (Portland) shows a single, wonderfully whimsical piece, Boiler Boy. Koudelka is interested in “architectural, mechanical and industrial images,” and Boiler Boy looks like an old metal antique with cracked paint, but it’s all clay. His pieces are the result of throwing, hand- building and use of molds made from found objects. Surface treatments include salt fir- ing, followed by sandblasting, re-glazing, and re-firing to “further develop layers of texture, color, and imagery.” Laurie Hennig’s (Boulder Creek, Calif.) pieces, also figurative, include a naked piper in cowboy boots, one huge cowboy boot and a giant stogie. Her husband, Dan Hennig, combines sculpture — of Southwest creatures — and vessel. One jar has an iguana head for a spout; a parrot is perched on the rim of a flowering-cactus vessel. Other artists opt for sculptural vessels instead, and the teapot is a recurring motif. “Teapots are a starting-point for imagina- tive designs,” Harrison said. Gina Freuen (Spokane) is one of the artists who reinter- prets the teapot shape into whimsical porce- lain sculpture. Freuen’s pieces are straight from Alice in Wonderland, and each has a personality. You would not be surprised to see them dance around and sing. Do lift the lids, and you may be rewarded with anoth- er diminutive teapot. Leslie Lee’s (Jacksonville) Hatching News Teapot Form consists of a bust of a woman with two birds on her head. One, singing into her ear, is the handle; the other’s open beak is the spout. The lid is a bird’s nest nestled in her hair. Most of Lee’s work is autobiographical or associated with a story. Refilling the Empty Heart shows a bust of her husband clutching a sheath of poems he wrote to deal with grief. Peter Potter’s Pack o’ Peckers, inspired by an exhibition of Mexican sculpture, depicts a red-hued snake-charmer charming penis-headed snakes out of a basket on his lap. In Dennis Meiners’s (Jacksonville) play- ful teapot, Death Takes Time Off to Go Bowling, the lid is Death’s hooded head, the handle his bent arm, and the spout is part of the scythe. His other pieces include stoneware wall-plat- ters with deli- cate motifs in blues, ochres and red. Mark Heiman (Estacada) infused with playfulness not teapots but a group of four jugs, Drinking Buddies, that appear quite tipsy and balance- impaired, an impression rein- forced by wavy lines incised on their ochre surfaces. His other vessel forms are inspired either by Japanese or Viking art SECRETARY OF DEFENSE BY KATY MCFADDEN OREGON COAST BY SARKIS ANTIKAJIAN forms and calligraphy. All are fired with wood in an anagama kiln. Magically, dur- ing firing, glazes crackle or elegantly peel off like bark in just the right spots. Gil Harrison’s vessels are about form rather than whimsicality. Their rich, shiny, black glaze, reminiscent of lacquer, lends them drama and stateliness. In earlier pieces, Harrison used the shape of Asian roofs as a starting-point for form, but his later ones are inspired by the shape of falling drops and set up on tripod feet to preserve their drop form. His pieces, thrown and finished with characteristic pulled strands of clay, exhibit exquisite bal- ance and proportion. Patrick Horsley (Portland) is strongly influenced by architecture. His focus is also on form, his vessels transcending function to become sculptures thrown and altered with an unerring eye for line, volume and structural harmony. His glazes, unreflective so that nothing distracts from form, are not decorative but instead a constitutive, ele- ment of design. Color is used with sobriety and precision using a wax-resist technique: bluish-purple or ochre against black or a stunning black-on-black.. This is an exhibition not to be missed: Major Works in Clay, through Oct. 18, Karin Clarke Gallery. *** Some 40 years ago, Sarkis Antikajian settled down on Oregon farmland and made it his home. His love and appre- ciation for Oregon landscapes, including his own garden is expressed through his paintings of local rural and coastal scenes, of still lifes with flowers from his garden. His love of painting, however, comes first. Though his main medium is oil, Antikajian paints very quick- ly, seldom spending more than a few hours on a painting. He uses his colors pure, straight from the tube, rather than first mixing them on a palette. Since he works with wet paint only, decisiveness is crucial — he can’t afford to rework the colors or they would turn muddy. Indeed, this blunt, decisive brushstroke is Antikajian’s hallmark as a painter. Up close, one may notice only a jumble of long brushstrokes. Yet step back and the paintings not only acquire coherence, but the viewer is seized by their liveliness and energy, which are precisely due to Antikajian’s way of applying paint — a technique borrowed from the Impressionists to which he adds an expressive energy that more properly belongs to post- Impressionism. At a distance, his colors turn vibrant rather than overly bright, and become the proper subject of the paintings. As exemplified by his Newport coast painting, Oregon Coast #1, Antikajian’s style is particularly suited to coastal land- scape with a tumult of rocks and sea. Oregon Coast #1 follows a yin-yang pattern of composition that bisects the canvas diag- onally, forming one blue triangle to the lower left while the upper right is dominat- ed by greens, reds and browns. Each color scheme reappears in the other part as a bal- ancing accent. Yet I find Antikajian at his best in his paintings of human figures. Diane is a vivid portrait in warm tones against a cool green background. It catches not only the pensive mood of the subject, a certain wistfulness, but something in the young woman’s pose also hints at the restlessness of youth, its readiness to get up and go. In New Mexico Vendors, four bundled- up street vendors with red blankets on their laps sit on portable chairs against a wall, their wares at their feet on a pink blanket. Despite the bright colors, a certain sadness pervades the scene, entirely suggested by the vendors’ posture, which evokes resigna- tion to a hard life together with feeling cold. I wish therefore that the exhibition would entail more portraits and human fig- ures, or even landscapes, and less still lifes, a subject matter I found generally difficult to warm up to. Amateurs painting still lifes, on the other hand, will probably feel grati- fied by the traditional compositions. Painting by Sarkis Antikajian, through Nov. 11, Alder Gallery, Coburg. The gallery also hosts an exhibi- tion of the Eugene Glass School’s Goblet Competition. ew OCTOBER 9, 2003 45
