This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
competition because they all have to be a museum, a library or an office building. As Ms. Stein might have said, “A watermelon is a watermelon is a watermelon...” Luis Maza’s Free Standing Melon Slice, a huge casein, acrylic and glitter sculpture of a slice of watermelon stood at the entrance of the gallery, whetting the aesthetic appetites of passersby. Maza’s piece in many ways typifies the rest of the works in the ex hibition. It is playful, humorous, skillfully executed, easily palpable and delightfully intriguing. All of the artworks in the show incorporate some or all of these characteristics, while reflecting the individual artist’s technique and style. Just as no two watermelons are identically alike, despite fundamental similarities, so be it with melon art. As in nature, the fruits of the melon artists’ labor vary in quality and category, both physical and aesthetic. Some folks have green thumbs, other folks can’t grow weeds. As one might expect, still life pain tings are much in evidence. Romantic Classicism lives in Helen Means’ entry, titled Still Life. Her oil paint ing of two watermelons on a table recalls a seventeenth century Spanish bodegon or an eighteenth century French nature morte with its lush, soft realism and traditional composi tion. In another example, Whittier Wright incorporates classical still life iconography, a table, kitchen knife and fruit, with neo-Matisse style and color, tempered by Wright’s slick, controlled expression. Guy Robinson reveals a psychedelic side of the watermelon still life with his oil paint ing, Hallucinogenic Watermelon and Typical Iconography: Hallucino genic Pregnancy Due to Swallowing Seeds. Robinson’s acidic visions are rendered in a Boschian manner and setting. The paintings’ enigmatic con tent seems to imply that the garden of earthly delights includes some very potent varities of watermelon. Other works loosely grouped under the still life heading include Lee Lawson’s two small acrylic paintings, Noah’s Watermelon and the nicely textured Still Life. In the latter, a watermelon sits on a sawhorse which has been draped with a white sheet. Lawson has applied the paint for the sheet in thicknesses which form shadow lines exactly imitating folds in the white cloth-a modest but effective example of three-dimensional painterly illu sion. A couple of photographers also licked their lips when confronted with the Watermelon Show and proceeded to sink their teeth into its juicy sub ject. Kathleen Gegan Morse’s altered photograph conjures up visions of otherworldly watermelon products. George Gruby’s Southern R.R. Melon, with its watermelon sitting on a railroad track excreting fireworks, is a watermelon photograph collector’s dream come true-and there’s plenty of ya’ll out there, right? There were of course, enough drawings and prints to insure no melon-ic technique was overlooked. Nellie Mae Rowe’s whimsical, in genuous crayon rendering, Warter Mellon Days, cleared up the spelling of watermelon once and for all for the New York fans. Included in the ex hibit was a series of twelve monoprints by Anthony Rice, A Year of Watermelons, each print cor responding to a month of the year. A full length watermelon slice is seen laterally, surrounded by a thick aura of splashed color, which varies accor- Art Papers September-October 1981 Kiyoaki Kato, Georgia Plant Bower, silver print, 1980 (photo: courtesy of Fay Gold Gallery). ding to the time of year. For example, August’s watermelon has swoops of hot reds and burning oranges around the fruit. Colors cascade down the right side of the surface on all the prints, and as one flips through the twelve, the gradations of hue from dark winter black to spring green to autumnal brown flow naturally in seasonal rhythms. Wptermelone- mania, a paper print by Hedi Bak is notable for its title at least, if not its fruity texture and color. Bernie Casey is represented by two acrylic pain tings, Melon Melody, with a guitar shaped watermelon, and Watermelon Moon Man as well as an interesting pencil drawing, Watermelon Hand, in which a structural interplay between image, the written word and the subject-object relationship is con structed from a few simple elements. Perhaps due to the watermelon’s unique shape and physical substance, the sculptors’ entries were consistent ly the most ingenious and entertain ing. There were concrete-on-canvas watermelons by Betty Duncan, a real istically carved and painted wood watermelon by Ned Cartledge, and the made-to-order clay melons of Ran Carey. Some of Carey’s phony fruits, thanks to their brain-tissue out- side/pulpy-fruit inside construction, shed new light on the old expression, “Aw shucks, the boy’s just got watermelon on the brain.” John and Gail Campbell showed various ex amples of their carved, painted wood sculptures. They had “wood-er- melons” in an old wheelbarrow, in an old Coca-Cola crate wagon, being hawked by a Black figure at a miniature watermelon stand, and just sitting around the gallery space. There was a painted steel Watermelon Chair with Divining Rod by Ke Francis, a work of great imaginativeness and comic exuberance. Also in the fantasy mode was Julian Fernandez’ small porcelain, neon and tapestry sculp ture, The Melofont. A note by the ar tist explains the strange off-white elephant-like figure with red neon tusks as the work helper of the watermelon fairies. OK, Fernandez, whatever you say. There were numerous other aesthetic melon manifestations deser ving at least brief mention: the giant Famous Slice painting by Comer Jen nings; John Grunta’s odd little mixed media piece, much like the old Cracker Jack games with black marble “seeds” which roll around in a little enclosed box done in watermelon motif (of course); Miriam Newman’s Watermelon Landscape, with an im aginary melon emerging from a perfectly suitable color “field”; and Larry Connatser’s funky Landscape in the Colors of Watermelon, predict ably done in his raised dot style. The harvest of this year’s Watermelon Show is as enjoyable as it is eclectic. The Stanley & Schenck ex hibition is an entertaining concept employed to give local and regional artists a vital environment in which to display their work, attract an au dience, and reap a bit of what they sow. Through the planting of seeds of recognition and notoriety in the minds of the gallery-going public, these artists may be better equipped to continue producing an enriched crop from their fertile imaginations. There’s just no substitute for juicy, creative watermelon. —Douglass DeLoach Douglass DeLoach, one of the few Southeastern experts on horror films, has been known to enjoy an ice-cold slice of watermelon in his time. Group Show Fay Gold Gallery Atlanta, Georgia August 4 - September 8 (The paintings in this exhibit are reviewed by Valerie McKenzie, and the photographs by William A. Brown) The overriding consideration in the selection of these painters seemed to be that they are all faculty members at Atlanta College of Art or Georgia State University, with the exception of one who instead taught for four years at a college in Pennsylvania before moving to Atlanta. The press release accompanying this show tells us that the result of Ms. Gold’s “marathon tour” of artists’ studios and homes is a body of work which is ‘•‘pointing in new directions.” Although for some of the artists the work exhibited is a change from previous styles, these paintings and works on paper could hardly be con sidered avant-garde. Rather, they explore standard formalistic concerns such as color and surface interrela tions, spatial and dimensional rela tionships, painterly aspects, and pat terning, all within a very decorative context. Anthony Greco showed two large canvases, one of vertical bands of beige which gradate into grayish- blackish bands as the eye reads the painting from left to right. Faintly superimposed on these are two large circles. Another painting consists of vertical and horizontal bands, which, like Frank Stella’s early work, echo the dimensions of the canvas. These are painted in bands of beige, blue, and white with subtle variations within the faint circle centrally superimposed on the bands. Philip Lancaster’s nearly monochromatic works are executed in acrylic paint and sand, applied with a window squeegee. The effect is a rich, painterly surface texture. Painting with sand is really nothing new, however. The artist succeeds best with a tense and energetic charcoal and pencil drawing which works better with its sculptural, push-pull surface agitation than does his own three- dimensionally shaped work entitled Letter to Philadelphia. Michael Gaston’s canvas shows him to be a skillful colorist. The artist effectively creates spatial modula tions by layering his color areas. Brilliant hues of magenta, taupe and violet, and softer tonalities saturate the surface of the canvas. Gaston then overpaints this surface with two wide bands of translucent green pastel on the sides, and thin bars of green edged with violet L-shapes. The total effect is lyrical and elusive, and highly decorative. Corrinne Colarusso’s Water Paint ing is as doggedly wearying to view as seemingly was its execution. This work suffers from an insecure ex cessiveness, not only in the abun dance of paint, but also in the ir ritating contrast of high-key blues and violets with a flat, harsh orange. The energy the artist hints at in the move ment of her brush gets lost somewhere in the flood. Medford Johnston showed three works, all of which contain brightly colored polka dots and triangular forms on backgrounds of brilliant turquoise, violet and orange. Once again these are very decorative works, almost silly, like an expensive wrap ping paper. The illusionistic effect of free floating geometric forms painted in bright, intense colors, is based in a tradition stemming from the work of Kandinsky and the Russian Supre matists. Johnston’s forms, however, feel the full pull of gravity, and although they lack a floating or skim ming quality, they still retain their pleasantly decorative quality and light-hearted mood. Tom Francis’ work is the only non abstract painting in the show. In two smaller works the artist applies his paint thickly and sloppily, almost like fingerpainting, which lends an energetic quality to his patterned palm trees, clouds and schoolbuses. A larger work depicts patterned clouds, schoolbuses and small figures and uses the same bright clear coloring as the smaller works, although less vigorously brushed. These works are the most confident in the show, but are marred by a somewhat trendy at titude. They’re playful and fanciful to be sure, but hardly “satiric” or “west coast in feel”(s/c) as the artist pur ports. Overall, the show lacks dynamism and fresh vision. Although the works were often visually pleasing, there is no great originality at work here, nor is there much conceptual or intellec tual contect. Perhaps a group show on local non-academic painters would produce something more invigorating and challenging than the tentativeness that characterized this exhibit. —Valerie McKenzie 18
