Banana Bloom Rick Lodmell is both prepared and lucky.

 

Equipped with a 10.2-megapixel camera, a calm spirit, and an eye for beauty, he ardently tramps out into the Hennepin canal landscape during twilight and early morning, in all seasons. He is looking for that momentary vision of the natural world, always moving and transforming, to capture what is seen in an instant.

 

The recently closed show at the Quad City International Airport art gallery featured nearly 50 stunning works: the serigraphy of Karen Blomme, the metal works of Tom Lytle, and the oil paintings and constructed boxes of Heidi Hernandez. I have exhibited with all three artists and have always been impressed by how their works strongly define the character of an exhibition.

 

While a handful of pieces are charged with exploratory energy, many of the works are more predictable progressions or refinements of previous visual explorations.

 

Blu NOLA While the work of Blomme and Lytle (both established area artists) seeks to cultivate visual and conceptual territories that they have already "claimed" with previous imagery, Hernandez (a younger, up-and-coming artist) is more vigorously exploring the "unknown" to find her own territory.

Calliope Suite (Editor's note: St. Ambrose University art professor Kristin Quinn opened a sabbatical exhibit - Between Sea & Sky - last week in the school's Catich Gallery. River Cities' Reader art critics Bruce Carter and Steve Banks met to talk about her new work. Excerpts of their conversation follow; audio from their discussion can be downloaded by clicking here .)

 

beading by Maggie Meister Bead artist Maggie Meister found her voice in Italy.

She began beading 15 years ago and started teaching beading in 1996.

"Before I went to Italy, I was doing very basic jewelry design," said Meister, who will be teaching how to make two of her jewelry pieces at Your Design Ltd. in Bettendorf on March 8 and 9. "I didn't really feel like I had any kind of voice. I knew I wanted to do something, but it wasn't until I moved to Italy that things start to click into place."

Clear Your Mind: Contemporary Glass Invitational The Figge Art Museum's Contemporary Glass Invitational feels dangerous. The glass process itself carries the physical peril of fire and molten liquid. The artistic effects are also unsettling, combining soothing beauty with surprise. These glass sculptures glow with intense and subtle visual pleasures, but they also create anxiety through their tensions and contradictions.

Bruce Walters' Sold House Creepy bunny costumes rendered in charcoal on paper, elongated hands rising out of the water to scratch at the stormy sky, a long, unspooled, film-like reel of hands signing out a missive wrapped around toppled driftwood pillars, and a possible gate to the underworld are parts of two separate book-based bodies of work now at Quad City Arts. One set re-presents the familiar with superb technical eloquence, utilizing the book as an end-product receptacle. The other, more adventurous body of work requires the book to become a component of the viewer's experience of the show.

Reader issue #662 Primal fires transform mud into stone. Tanned-hide-like scrolls stitched together with tea bags evoke tribal dance and hunting rituals. Intricate and whimsical lattice-like snowflake images lighten the spirits. These elemental forces of nature are on display at the Quad City Arts gallery, in the forms of clay works by Sally Gierke and Jim Cronk, cut paperworks by Keith Bonnstetter, and tribal fabric works from Tricia Coulson.

Reader issue #657 John Bloom was a master of lines. Drawing directly from everyday life, he transformed his observations with a skillful economy and nuance that can only come from long experience and total observation. Even in his lithographic printmaking, his subtle and beautifully lighted tones were created by a multitude of lines. In his paintings, his linear preparations paid off in a painting style that grew progressively lighter, almost effortless.

fiberglas 1 A luminescent circle gleams over an ocean of subtle fabric waves. Little squares of small purple beads sit like boats on a pale-blue sea. Surprising fragments of red and white texture enter from the side. A cloaked green figure seems to walk along the shore to a blue-misted house in the distance. Behind in the sky, cloud forms repeat the patterns on the surface of the water. Little gold amulets shine in the light. One can feel the coolness in the air and the breeze rising up from the water.

651_coverthumb.jpg Rarely does paint - the actual physical stuff laden with pigment - have as enthusiastic a friend as it does with Felix Morelo. The artist often lavishes his surfaces with thick and lustrous textured passages in blood reds, dirty aqua greens, or caustic oranges. In other areas, he stingily scrubs in the most minimal hints of browns or soiled denim blues.

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