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Art Review: ‘Best of the West’ boasts varied content |
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There are quiet landscapes, still lifes, figure studies and a tongue-in-cheek action scene in a show whose sheer variety of content proves that the West is, indeed, "a state of mind.”
Called the "Best of the West,” the exhibit at JRB Art at the Elms contains works by three Oklahoma artists, two Colorado artists and six artists from Taos or Santa Fe, N.M.
A retired North Carolina surgeon who lives in Durango, Colo., Karl Brenner orchestrates the interplay between green waters, tall pine trees and rocky coastal headlands in his "China Cove, Point Lobos” oil. A silhouetted man wearing a striped blanket takes a "Late Day Walk” as shadows creep up the sides of a sunlit mountain in an oil by Logan Hagege that brings to mind some of the work of Maynard Dixon.
Equally understated is Glenn Dean’s smaller oil of a white-robed man standing on an adobe building, in front of blue peaks, as a kind of emblem of "Pueblo Life.” Dean and Hagege are Santa Fe artists.
Sam Echols of Oklahoma City supplies the show with a superb oil portrait of an American Indian man named "Richard,” wearing a bandanna under his brown Western hat, posed in front of a turquoise background.
Aspen, Colo., artist Tammie Lane contributes deftly executed charcoal drawings of the heads of an antelope, moose and mountain goat, plus a larger, vertically hung watercolor of aspen trees. A bit more expressive and fantastic is an acrylic by Oklahoma artist Mike Larsen in which the "Buffalo Hunt” depicted on a warrior’s hide robe seems to come to life as he gestures with a bow in one hand.
Expressive and vibrant-hued are Taos artist Jim Wagner’s acrylics of chickens in front of "Hotchkiss Ranch” and buffalo grazing near aspen trees whose changing colors are a "First Sign of Fall.”
Even more exaggerated and edgy — to the point of becoming a spoof of Wild West action scenes — is Billy Schenck’s luridly vivid oil of a rider shooting into a house as a way of "Making the Mrs. Stay Home.”
More conventional but enjoyable are the figurative and still life paintings of Taos artists Sherrie McGraw and Dorothy Lampl, and Oklahoma City artist Carla Anglada. McGraw gives an unfinished, Old Masters look to her oil of a redheaded woman named "Eva,” while Anglada captures the rich yellow of "Sunflowers” and Lampl the muted hues of "Peach Roses.”
— John Brandenburg
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© Joy Reed Belt 2010
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