The tree jumps out. And the buildings. And the still life.
In the new show of 26 works by mixed-media artist Corrine Smith, these mundane objects are nearly shocking. Smith, who teaches design at Augustana College, said she encourages her students to think of shape for shape's sake, color for color's sake, and texture for texture's sake. "I'm very much a formalist in that way," she said last week. "Composition is a stickler for me."
Her painting for the past three decades has followed those rules with abstract, sophisticated treatments of the most basic rectangular and round forms. ("I don't think that I have exhausted those shapes yet," she said. "I'm not the least bit tired of them at all.")
So even though much of the work in the new show (which runs through April at MidCoast Gallery West in downtown Rock Island) fits comfortably in her pure-design aesthetic, something approaching representative painting -- in her Shelter series and in the tabletop still life The Blue Olive -- appears to represent a radical shift. Shelter #9 is clearly meant as a pair of buildings and a tree.
"That's all really new to me," she said of this transition.
Shelter Series #14 is not as easily identifiable, and Smith said the "buildings" can also be seen as two people. The tree is missing its crown. "I suppose I didn't put the little green top on there because it kind of freaked me out that I made a tree," she said.
(Editor's note: The River Cities' Reader each month will publish images from the Quad City Photography Club. Click on the image for a larger version.)
Photographer: Burt Gearhart of Le Claire, Iowa. He is a member of the Quad City Photography Club and a retired computer software developer who has turned his attention to photography. Burt, who is originally from Iowa, spent 38 years living in Texas but three years ago moved back to be with family and enjoy his home state.
One of the biggest success stories to come out of Bucktown Center for the Arts is Emily Christenson and her nature-inspired works. Some early visitors to doeGallery were impressed with her art and took a postcard of one of her paintings back to a favorite gallery in Washington, DC. Within a year, Christenson's work was hanging on the walls at the Fine Art & Artists (FAA) Gallery in Georgetown along with some of the big names of the 20th Century. Luck certainly played a role in Christenson's story, but if the work hadn't been so good and so captivating, it wouldn't have gone any further than being a souvenir postcard.
At FAA, Christenson enjoyed two years of strong sales, a solo show of her work, and a review in the Washington Post. She was preparing a body of work for her second solo show, Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali, when she got a call that the gallery was closing after 15 years.
More than a year later, Christenson is premiering both a new Bucktown gallery/studio (called "e|c") and the 10 works that make up Rivers & Rain, Pieces of Denali. The show runs through the end of December, and the gallery is in the southeast corner on the second floor.
The Figge Art Museum will soon open its Frank Lloyd Wright gallery, a collection of eight pieces showing the architect/designer's "Prairie" and "Usonian" styles, documenting his shift toward ever-simpler forms.
The Figge describes the gallery as "a significant group of Wright's works that provide a chronological overview of his decorative arts and furniture designs. Although Wright is a notable architect, he was also an innovative designer of art glass, domestic interiors and furnishings, an aspect of his career that is less well-known to the general public."
Below is an edited audio discussion about the new gallery. Participating are Figge Senior Curator Greg Gilbert and Figge Art Museum Director Sean O'Harrow; asking questions are River Cities' Reader Managing Editor Jeff Ignatius and Quad-City Times Entertainment Editor David Burke.
The centerpiece of the current two-person exhibit at Quad City Arts is a collection of four paintings recalling Peter Xiao's childhood in China.
From an artistic perspective, Xiao is rendering people more conventionally in terms of both figure and color, said Les Bell, the other artist in the show. In the past, he said, Xiao worked in a "cubistic" space, bending figures and objects and colors to meet the formal needs of the piece.
Bell called Xiao's use of color in these new works "smoldering," and said: "It's a much more complex level of narrative than I've ever seen in his work. ... I'm completely charmed by the drama of these scenes."
Bell also said that "you'd swear he was working from models to get these individual personalities."
But these works come from memory, and Xiao -- a professor at Augustana College -- said that "I sort of turned [auto]biographical for the first time. I always worked with the figure but was usually shy about putting myself there, because you want to be objective about things."
