Many artists working today employ the quality of flatness in their compositions. It isn’t necessarily to emphasize the plane of the painted surface, remove the illusion of linear perspective, or accentuate the physical properties of dried paint. For the artists in “Flourish,” flatness is about compression. Their work compresses the physical dimensions of painting and still-life, while culling images from many different sources into flat planes, thereby allowing portraiture, patterning, coded language, and personal narrative to coexist in the same space.
The works in "Flourish" ask questions about the nature of art and probe for ideas beyond the limits of their media but Jennifer Davis, Terrence Payne, Erika Olson Gross, and Joe Sinness also maintain a distinct set of priorities. Their work asks to be understood on a different set of terms. This is work that, among other things, revels in the aesthetics of form, elaborate colors and textures, and the effects of flattened picture planes.
In Jennifer Davis’s painting, “Curious”, an alien’s four index fingers glow with light, surrounded by honeycombed auras. Tip-toed astride its bike, the character is an irresistible combination of other-wordly imagination and everyday still life. Throughout her career, Davis has created a distinct and singular voice in her colorfully painted fantasies. And it’s easy to get drawn into her imagination, with its palette, landscapes, and characters. When she begins an acrylic painting on panel she works quickly and intuitively; she doesn’t rely on sketches or drawings to set the composition. When painting figures, the artist often starts with the eyes and continues until the figure is finished; her creative energy starts in one place and grows outward. This is both how she paints and what she paints.
Seen in series, Davis’s work communicates a strong vision, but the works aren’t meant to be read as scenes in an ongoing narrative. Her paintings are filled with expressive patterns and delicate details. The use of stripes and argyle in “Pair” brings the girl and boy images together at the surface. The sprouting trees and flowers create an enviable, meditative solitude, beautiful details she employs in many of her paintings of individual people and couples. Because of their focus on characters, these pictures can read like iconic, mythical portraits. Davis insists that these anthropomorphic characters moonlight as symbols of specific personality traits—thus, the half-person, half-canine in “Reverence” carries the traits of both loyalty and friendship.
Erika Olson Gross is a multi-media artist whose sculptures and paintings reflect the poetry and fecundity of nature. Her new suite of intricate graphite drawings and gouache on paper paintings exemplify her figural abilities and embrace a new compositional stillness. She admits that depicting her young sons is quite personal, especially as she adjusts to being both an artist and a mother. Yet even in their intimacy, Olson GrossÂ’s works are invitations to explore ideas about creativity, childhood, and the passage of time. “Dream Quilt” is painted with a subjective sensitivity but is also observational. A person’s sleeping hours pass as if they were an instant. What these young boys are not aware of, and what they will wake up from their dreams and grow to appreciate, is that all time passes quickly.
Olson Gross’s work also draws on her interest in the affective possibilities of graphic and textile patterns. See the Swedish bride cushion design hovering above the delicately detailed lakeshore in “Lake North Star”. Using the flatness of painted patterns and atmospheric perspective the work strikes a balance between celebration and picturesque landscape. Like much of her new work, this piece considers the nature of time while also providing an optimistic yet sober look into the future. In “Fair Trajectory”, the candy-striped hot-air balloons positioned just above the boy’s head simultaneously reflect the boy and his drawing. They lift and rise on currents of hot air while providing a metaphor for bright thought bubbles.
If the figures in Terrence Payne’s oil pastels on paper look like costumed characters, that’s because, above all, Payne is a keen observer of the roles people play. His bold fields of color, wallpaper backdrops, and torqued figures are borrowed from Renaissance paintings and filmmaking, two areas of his interest. It would be hard to confuse Payne’s characters with Renaissance martyrs who have died for their beliefs, but Payne is intentional in pushing each figure to the forefront and curtaining off the background to give us a portrait without stereotype.
Payne is both an artist and eavesdropper. The texts he has hand-written on each drawing convey a sense of humor tinged with melancholy; they reveal his characters’ self-assurance and moxie as well as their internal narratives of disappointment and apathy. One can’t help giggling a bit uncomfortably at the funniest of these quips, which often represent the characters’ internal monologues—what they are thinking, what they have failed to do, where their expectations have fallen flat. The irony in Payne’s work isn’t just a way of chastising social injustice. He’s more interested in the smaller ironies of human behavior. It’s a sense of humor that cuts both ways—laughing with and laughing at. These texts cut through external appearances to the delicate pulp of personal feelings.
With a cue to look behind the straigh reading of an object and consider another meaning, Joe Sinness' colored pencil drawings provide openings into coded language, images of celebrity, and sublt double-entendres.
For years, country singer Dolly Parton has been one of the artist’s favorite subjects. In his two works, “The Giving and the Taking” and “Something Special”, Sinness pays homage to Parton and Barbra Streisand, two icons of gay culture. Although they are both singer/actors, these subjects are characters, larger-than-life performers. With her outrageous fashion and parody of sex appeal Parton embodies a particular kind of gussied-up femininity. Sinness carefully selects each object in his compositions and is drawn to the complexities embodied in actors like Parton and Streisand. These works are composed as delicately rendered still lifes, informed by both art history and popular culture. His subjects are ensconced in glass, which both immortalizes and preserves their legacy. When Parton landed on the cover of the AARP magazine, SInness celebrated the sincerity and enduracne of an iconic performer.
