Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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12 UCW JANUARY 18 - 24, 2023 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM 'States of Mind: Paintings by Angela Stout' on display at Gallery 208 by SONI MARTIN COVER Gallery 208 opens its first exhibit of the new year with States of Mind: Paintings by Angela Stout on Jan. 19. A painter, printmaker and sculptor, Stout is an artist who chooses to investigate the por- trait as a subject in her work. Visitors to the exhibit will experience a less obvious theme as the likeness of each individual dissipates into moments of discovering our humanity — one portrait at a time. Seeing a body of work by Stout is a palat- able experience, a contradiction between the physicality of paint and illusion — feelings are conjured. We experience each work as a comprehensible moment ; although abstract- ed, the artist evokes an emotion, something familiar. Stout practices the art of camouflage. We are enamored by the skills to create a like- ness, yet a feeling emerges from the artist's manipulation of material, illusion and the physical. An image on canvas or paper has the potential to evoke a type of certainty, often a dichotomy. In the painting titled "Deterioration," a fair-haired young woman looks intently at the viewer through the lens of a yellow-green filtered pictorial environment. e surface of the 36"x 36" painting on canvas has been deliberately scratched, the surface marred in a way that the flat illusion- istic layers of paint physically separate away from the painted surface. e marred mark-making begins to move across the figure — color and paint are re- leased from the surface — the figure remains motionless. A feeling emerges as we experi- ence the physicality of the paint in contrast to a transfixed illusionary figure suspended in spatial disorder. Seeing "Deterioration" viewers will have their own interpretation of meaning. For me, Stout has created a situation, and I find myself responding with empathy to the fixed figure in the painting, I feel moved to say "just breathe." In comparison, the artist limits herself to the talent of illusionistic painting to evoke meaning in the blue painting titled "O." Dual- ity is present. Stout has masterfully created hard and soft at the same moment. We experience the hardness of cold in con- trast to the soft supple flesh of the individual. e figure exists in a state of contrast : grace and hardship, obscurity and specificity, flat- ness and texture. "O" is an example of how the artist balances the theoretical and the emotional. e artist explained how she created a technical prob- lem to resolve. "In this painting, it was to focus on bal- ancing the achromatic with the chromatic, without it being noticeable. Since emotion is central to my work, it was important to create a feeling of coldness, an emotional or physical aspect of being cold." We naively enjoy Stout's work without knowing a process has always taken place to resolve a complicated technical order. If we look closely at the painting titled "Suppression," the order is more obvious. A male figure stretches the edge of an American flag across his face just below his eyes. As he gazes upward the softness of the flag hangs below his clenched hands. Examining the technical, we see that the young man is painted in tones of grey, where- as the flag is painted in saturated colors. e red and blue are in strong contrast to the greys. e implied diagonal movement of the stripes and arms directs us to the eyes as a focal point. e white of the background, stars and stripes are flattened patterns. Without spatial reference, the white is strategically used as composition, but also holds the figure between foreground and background. An extensive exhibition record, "Suppres- sion" was exhibited in an international online "Deterioration" by Angela Stout "All my art focuses on evoking feeling. I focus on the portrait, but they have underlying social themes. In addition to the philosophi- cal concerns in my work, I maintain a romantic view of beauty in the world around me." — Angela Stout, artist