Up & Coming Weekly

OCTOBER 14-20, 2009 UCW 15 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Cultural Expressions – Process and the End Results by SONI MARTIN The Fayetteville Arts Council on Hay Street is exhibiting Cultural Expressions this 4th Friday in October. If you didn't get a chance to see the results of the competition during the busy International Folk Festival weekend, there is still plenty of time to view the works by area artists who competed with a theme in mind — "artistic impressions of culture through painting, drawing, sculpture and mixed media." After the exhibit was selected by the jurors, Sean McDaniel, Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Fayetteville Technical Community, and yours truly, the Best in Show recipients were selected for the four categories listed on the prospectus: Best of Show in painting, drawing, sculpture and mixed media. For jurors, seeing works lined around the walls of the Arts Council is at best a yard sale of works competing with each other: works clashing in subject matter, big works, little works, sculpture and the two-dimensional next to each other, beads and bronze competing, technique and content as different as there are styles. Strong work never gets lost in the mix; it stands out immediately. They actually pop out of the lineup. Not to be left out of the exhibit are the more subtle works. They take a little more time to discover. The success of a work in this exhibit was dependent upon, but not limited to the principles of what makes a strong work of art: good composition, understanding of color where applicable, balance, principles of design and content. The use of the medium and material should appear effortless (not that it actually was effortless) due to the artist's skill — never overworked. By the time the exhibit is selected, the scrutiny takes place to select those works which are the strongest and fit the theme of the competition. After the exhibit is selected, the truest success of an exhibit depends on two things: the quality of the entries and equally important, is the way works are selected and organized to be presented in the gallery space. Thanks to Calvin Mims, the Arts Council's coordinator of artist services, visitors to the exhibit will move with ease throughout the gallery. Mims did a masterful job of organizing works that are dissimilar from each other. He made variety cohesive and unified by selecting like subjects to hang next to each other. A grouping of animals versus a grouping of still lifes, or work can be grouped simply by colors that complement each other on the gallery wall — even the scale of the work has to be taken into consideration. All of this is not to be taken for granted; it takes a skillful professional to set an exhibit properly and effectively. Different from other years, Mims hung all the winning entries on one wall in the west gallery. The grouping denoted the Best of Show from the categories referred to in the prospectus. Instead of searching for individual award winners, visitors to Cultural Expressions can view all the winning works in one location and grouping. Upon entering the main gallery, Earl Gardner's very large painting titled Pea Soup will immediately catch your eye. Well crafted, his painting is a serene setting of a boat moored at a dock; water and sky dominate in proportion, and man is small in nature. Yet it was his smaller and more colorful painting titled Rough Rooster which earned him the Best in Show in painting. For the jurors, the work needed to be relevant to the theme of the competition to win an award. Rough Rooster is an excellent painting, and it exudes something about a rural culture one might find beyond city limits. The content of the painting was more than a descriptive painting of a barn yard bird; the artist, through his painting, was able to give us insight to the personality of a particular rooster in his rural environment. There were other strong paintings in the exhibit. Just to name a few, Karen Moore's painting titled Mexico City stands out as a beautiful and colorful work to be admired. Ilse Oxendines' small oil on canvas titled The Last Roundup epitomizes something romantic about the stereotyped cowboy culture of rodeos, horseback riding and giddy-up! Brian Steverson, a local artist known for his paintings of the downtown area, is exhibiting a work titled 2008 Folk Festival. After taking a photograph of the crowds of people from last year's festival, Steverson uses his photograph to reinterpret the crowd and festivities in dabs of abstracted color; his signature use of black punches up any setting he selects to paint. There were many strong drawings in the competition, yet the scale, subject matter and craftsmanship of Charlotte Lane's pastel drawing, titled At the Festival, placed it as Best in Show in the drawing category. In colorful costumes, four young girls celebrate a festival in a distant South American country. Visitors to the gallery will immediately understand how Lane's pastel drawing is strong in composition and in the execution of the use of materials. Beauty is on the face of the girls and in their native costumes; beauty exudes in the effortless handling of a difficult medium. Marcella Casals mounted her cast bronze section of a face on the top portion of a 12-inch high, 6"X6" rectangle of solid wood. Small in scale, Vision earned her Best in Show for sculpture. The theatrical mask-like inference, narrative in content, contrasts against the simple block on which it is mounted. Well-crafted, Vision is an example of how an artist doesn't have to create on a large scale to evoke the complex. Romano Gennaro has several mixed-media works in the competition. Gennaro is known for her elaborate and extravagant use of materials in the medium of jewelry and wall hangings. Her wall hanging titled The Adventurous Trip of Italian Cristoforo Colombo to the Americas with Real and Imagined Risks is a fun work that references travel by water. In a mixed media message of sails and waves, in whites and blues, Gennaro has integrated her usual good sense of humor in both works she is exhibiting. It was Stephanie Crider who won Best of Show for mixed media. Small in scale, Crider's entry was a mixed metals and stone necklace in Cultural Expressions. Titled Celtic Cross, Crider used lampwork beads from the Land of Eire and cut-out metal shapes to construct her delicate wearable-art necklace. Many more works are on view in Cultural Expressions, with 20 artists exhibiting 49 works of art. From professional artists to amateurs, the Arts Council gave the artists in the community an opportunity to express their interpretation of culture. The exhibit can be visited this 4th Friday in October and until November 21, 2009. Congratulations to all the artists and award winners who were selected for a different exhibit — the Annual Fall Juried Competition by the Fayetteville Art Guild, hosted at the Cape Fear Studios on Maxwell Street. By the time this article is published, there may be only a day or two remaining to view the exhibit. The juror, David McCormick, Chair of the Department of Art at Southeastern Community College, selected 20 artists for the annual competition. First Place went to A. Jones Rogers for his large watercolor titled Cargill Plant; Second Place to Dwight Smith for Untitled Collage; Third Place went to Maria Celia Murray for her large digital photograph titled Beautiful Innocence; Honorable Mentions went to David McCune for his large metal relief titled Ecosystem and to LaMerle Deca for Jezebel, a pastel drawing. Rough Rooster by Earl Gardner SONI MARTIN, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 106 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. Vision by Marcela Casals

• Cover