28
Feb
2007
The latest show by Corrine Smith, running through March 9 at the Morrissey Gallery inside St. Ambrose University's Galvin Fine Arts Center, is a chance to see some exciting new color explorations by a painting and collage powerhouse. She has incorporated a wider range of bolder colors that have invigorated her powerful images with even more visual octane.
The
work of two artists now showing at the MidCoast Fine Arts Gallery in
LeClaire could easily be called The
Old World Made New and
All Creatures Great & Small.
How
do you choose from thousands of paintings, illustrations, and
drawings to represent a lifetime of making art? How can one express
an artist's wide range of vision in only 53 pieces?
Camus
once said that all artists try to reproduce in their work the most
moving experiences of their past. By using these memories as a
starting point, artists and writers give a delicious emotional energy
to their work. These events can then be constructed, modified, and
embellished to suit their ideas and images.
Leonardo
da Vinci was famous for improvising poetry while playing the lute.
Mozart and Beethoven were legendary for their spontaneous piano
inventions. And blues and jazz musicians have always loved the
ability to create new combinations of music or words while playing.
Most
of us remember our grade-school art classes, in which we cut up
construction paper or magazine photographs and glued them together to
make a collage. Few of us thought then that we were making art, for
it seemed so much fun.
Jim
Riesberg's most recent series of large-format collages originated
from an auctioned four-pound box of vintage photographs, musty old
invoices, advertisements, and water-stained inventory sheets from a
hardware store that had been in business in the 1880s. By scanning
and combining these written and visual sources, he has created a
many-layered body of images, full of emotion.
Three
excellent young painters - Sara Fletcher, Sarah Goffstein, and
Greta Songe - shine in their current exhibition at the Leger
Gallery in downtown Davenport. Former students of Ron Cohen at the
University of Iowa, they are all at the beginnings of their teaching
careers. These artists are well on their way in establishing their
personal styles in art, and all have something individual to say
about experience and memory. One artist is influenced by the light
and stillness of Vermeer, another by the colors and patterns of the
artist Vuillard, and the third by the flowing music of nature.
In the 1985 HBO mockumentary The History of White People in America, co-writer and host Martin Mull offered the world mayonnaise-loving WASPs - suburbanites who had lost any sense of their roots, to the point that one child's understanding of his own heritage was limited to the streets on which he and his parents had lived.
