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The Arts - Three Milligan artists on display at JCAAC
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| “Curved Road and Red Tree,” egg tempera on wood, by Nick Blosser
(Ron Campbell / Johnson City Press) |
By Allison Alfonso
Johnson City Press Staff Writer
aalfonso@johnsoncitypress.com
Is there a reason Nick Blosser, Dan Drage and Evan Longfield are exhibiting their works at the Johnson City Area Arts Council this month besides familiarity?
Having thought about their works for a long time after viewing them, I've come to think each artist shares an interest in color or its absence, how texture is painted or sculpted, and space and dynamics.
Drage and Longfield are graduates of Milligan College, where Blosser teaches art. Drage's sculpture is abstract and made of marble, alabaster, wood and sometimes soil. His artist statement reveals his forms emerge from ideas about war, space, power, humility, nature and figure.
Longfield said his oil-on-carved-wood Biblical painted iconic carvings occupy a space between painting and sculpture and serve to trigger viewers' memories rather than tell a specific religious or literary tale.
Blosser paints with egg tempera on panel, and said he's interested in painting specific objects of a landscape such as trees and mountains and examining the abstract relationships between them.
Each of Longfield's works alludes to the Bible, but does that have to limit the viewers' interpretations? I think it's an important question to ask since he says in his statement that they don't tell specific stories. His images include Mary and Joseph, the baby Jesus, Lazarus and Eve.
“Eve and the Serpent” features a naked, frowning Eve with a big red apple in front of her, enticing yet clearly dangerous. A snake slithers, its movement interesting because of the solidity from which it is formed, from the top toward her from amid two apple trees, round like a child's drawing of a tree and suggestive of early civilizations that hadn't yet learned perspective. You needn't know the full story to understand the artist may be saying something broader about the consequences of yielding to temptation and the loss of innocence.
You needn't know the Bible thoroughly to enjoy looking at his work because you can tell by looking at his works that his inspiration is genuine. His works glow with rich colors and simple representational figures suggesting man's love of carving and folk art influences. His approach, however, is more intellectual than the typical naive artist. His work has a great contemporary physical presence that's the result of his artful manipulation of color, texture, space and dimension.
Simple depictions of physical place combine with minimal figuration and maximum color depth. I couldn't help thinking of art history and other cultures. I was walking, it seemed, through an old European museum and glancing at glowing rich icon paintings of old.
Drage's “Separation,” marble on wood, is a white marble abstraction with a rough base out of which emerges something smooth and refined. It's a play, perhaps, on the idea of beauty emerging from the most unlikely places, beginnings and endings.
It's a fascinating look at an artist taking a piece of stone and creating a work of art that portrays the sculpting process and suggests something beyond itself. The center is carved so that it looks like the marble is being pulled and i's center is ripping. It makes subtle references to flesh, and yet, like all memorable art, it also suggests something other and indefinable. Something fragile and beautiful has been made from something unmemorable but strong. If we try to make ourselves into something other than what we are, this piece suggests, we will fall apart.
“Sin,” alabaster on wood, features a chiseled, lumpish torsolike form. It's rough with marks suggesting slashes or ruptures of the flesh. However, the snake or internal organ that circles and seems to be strangling the body shines like a treasure.
Blosser paints trees, mountains and grasses with broad swatches of color and subtle highlights to portray dusk and dawn, when light and dark reduce the land to sometimes menacing round or angular forms, suggestive but not definitive. Up close, they look like quick sketches. But step back and watch the forms converge in a beautiful seamless whole radiating warmth and a beautiful light.
“Curved Road and Red Tree” has two colorless blackish trees in the foreground, a winding road at left and a tree in the center whose leaves glow a deep red in lush golden grass. A white sky suggesting heat melds into roundish gray mountains with the artist's seemingly easy swish of the brush.
“New Growth on Cut Hydrangea” portrays a white sky and hump-like mountains of blue and black that sit like elephants or rhinoceros in the distant field of bright lime green. The old gray hydrangea stocks seem dry as petrified bone, and the new shoots sprout daintily from those ancient roots sending forth new life to the world. VIEW ARTICLE
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