FEBRUARY 9, 2017 // 11
SUBMITTED PHOTO
“Toweling
the
Back I” by Mabrie
Ormes of Ash-
land. “I am fo-
cused on creat-
ing nudes who
express them-
selves as sub-
jects,” she says.
“The ‘Bathers’ are
nudes busy with
their
toilettes.
They are not
‘posing’ in the
traditional sense:
The display of
their naked bod-
ies to the eye of
a viewer is not
their
primary
purpose. In this
work, I take a
page from Edgar
Degas.”
ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
dynamics, aging, mental and physical health,
etc.” Perhaps, but art historian Sir Kenneth
Clark put it in simpler terms: “The nude does
not simply represent the body, but relates it, by
analogy, to all structures that have become part
of our imaginative experience.”
Lawrence Mannato’s “The Sign: When My
Life Was Ebbing Away, Then I Remembered”
and Nick Reszetar’s “Excepatum” combine
realistic drawing with dense layers of indistinct
abstraction, struggles of human interaction
without and the mysteries of the soul within.
Stephanie Silco’s “Humanoid,” on the other
hand, is all abstraction, a posed shell of the
soul.
The triumph of drawing in this show
continues with portraiture, in particular Paul
Barton’s “Lioness,” Patrick Deshaye’s “Model
Hiding a Tattoo,” and local favorite Robert
Paulmenn’s “Reclining Nude.”
The gesture of the model before a burned
landscape across a body of water, in Brad
Gooch’s “After the Burn,” exhibits a poised
tension that balances on the edge of surrealism.
Edi Franc’s “The Day I Lost My Head” goes
6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9
CCC Royal Nebeker Art Gallery
1651 Lexington Ave., Astoria
Awards to be announced
Free
right over the edge, as does Mike South-
ern’s flaming landscape, “Burn.” Southern’s
torch-bearing nude in the foreground tells a
story, but what might it be? Franc, of Kaʻaʻa-
wa, Hawaii, paints realistically a subject she
describes surrealistically as, “giant, headless
figures suspended in space, dysmorphic, de-
personalized creatures floating above the ocean
seem to exist in a new, unearthly realm, the
one created in dreams or our subconscious.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir said that he always
wanted to paint nudes “as if they were some
splendid fruit,” but the nudes in internation-
ally recognized Portland-based artist Henk
Pander’s three large paintings appear overripe.
The works, Pander says, “Echo the decadent
period of the 1960s still lingering, while
recognizing aging, mortality and existential
loneliness.” These are also the paintings that
may raise eyebrows in this show, for many will
consider them not only decadent but erotic or
pornographic.
Erotic art has been with us at least since
mesolithic times, but for most of history it
has existed on the fringes of art, in the bath
house murals of Pompeii, say, or in ceramics,
sculpture or paintings exhibited in intimate
contexts. Today the erotic has become more
mainstream, more accepted whether it is art
or not. And how to distinguish? U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Potter Stewart famously couldn’t
define pornography, “but I know it when I see
it.” That was in 1964, and times have changed
“The living model, the naked body of a
woman, is the privileged seat of feeling, but
also of questioning,” Henri Matisse said. In su-
perficially divulging the intimacies of sex, does
erotic art achieve something meaningful? Or
does it sacrifice the intimacy of mind and soul,
the body in relationship to self and surround-
ings, for what is simply vulgar?
This year, “Au Naturel” gives you a chance
to decide for yourself.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Stephanie Silco’s “Humanoid 12,” is all abstrac-
tion, a posed shell of the soul.