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Plane Creative: Artists show their flexibility with media at exhibition of paintings, pottery, more
Mario Gallucci Photo
Running into the Divine, by John Nygren, is paired with his poem about a solitary visionary experience that he had at a coastal wildlife refuge.
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Published: May 10, 2009
GREENSBORO -- In an increasingly specialized society, it's not surprising that some artists choose to work in a single medium, striving to master the materials and the techniques. Others are not content to focus their creative efforts so narrowly.
An exhibition at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art through June 7 showcases the work of nine North Carolina artists whose creativity is not narrowly defined. Its title, "Plane & Pedestal," references both the planar surfaces of two-dimensional artworks and the pedestals on which sculptures are traditionally displayed in museums and art galleries.
All of these artists make sculptures as well as paintings, drawings or photographs. But some of them are more adept with varied mediums and work equally well in either two or three dimensions. Mark Casey Milestone, a Winston-Salem artist who has been making inspired paintings, drawings and sculptural pieces for more than 20 years, is a good example.
In the area of sculpture, Milestone is represented by a few funky, whimsical pieces from the early 1990s, made largely from found metal and wood scraps. His post-1999 sculptures include a slapdash found-object assemblage titled UFO Detector; two toylike, painted sheet-metal replicas of wheeled vehicles; several small figural ceramic pieces and an open-air model airplane whose front is a dried gourd resembling a bird's head and torso -- hence the title Bird Float.
Also on view are several of Milestone's small paintings and works on paper, ranging in style from the crude spareness of The Critic (a painted portrait bust) to the subtle elegance of Dancer with Mirror, a lavendar-hued watercolor of a solitary harlequin.
Two artists from Walnut Cove -- John Nygren and Tom Suomalainen -- have exhibited frequently in the Triad and elsewhere since the 1960s, and their names are especially familiar to fans of fine crafts. Nygren is known as a glassblower who creates intricately decorated vessels and miniature sculptures of amphibians and fish; Suomalainen is known as a ceramic sculptor specializing in figurally referenced vessels.
Nygren is represented by a number of compact glass pieces typical of his most widely known work, including several vases, bug-eyed frog paperweights and related figural sculptures. But the selection of his work, dating back as far as the 1960s, also includes early utilitarian metal pieces, small ceramic sculptures, drawings, paintings and even poetry.
The influences of traditional Chinese and Japanese ink-brush painting can be seen not only in the plant forms ornamenting some of Nygren's small glass vases, but also in a few small landscape drawings. Also noteworthy among Nygren's two-dimensional works are a pair of circle-format drawings that channel aspects of Tibetan mandala design, and a psychedelic coastal-marsh landscape in shades of neon orange and electric blue. The latter image, Running into the Divine, is paired with Nygren's identically titled, wall-mounted poem about a solitary visionary experience he had at a coastal wildlife refuge.
Characteristic of Suomalainen's best known work are two totemlike ceramic sculptures from the 1990s, both in the form of abstracted figures that combine humanoid features with the features of birds, fish or other fauna. In a more lighthearted, whimsical vein is his installation of 10 small, vessel-referenced sculptures of anthropomorphized animals holding musical instruments or posed with stylized hand gestures. They're reminiscent of characters from children's books by Beatrix Potter and Kenneth Grahame.
Another aspect of Suomalainen's work is reflected in 25 of his small, loosely rendered drawings in ink and/or watercolor. These run a stylistic gamut that encompasses straightforward landscape depiction, organic abstraction and whimsical surrealism. They have a casual, playful quality that suggests a free-ranging, stream-of-consciousness approach.
Tim Turner of Creedmoor is the show's other ceramist. His display of vessels indicates a more traditional approach to clay than Suomalainen's. These stoneware bottles and other containers -- about 25 in all -- are elegantly formed and virtually devoid of ornament other than their pale, earth- and sky-toned glazes. Turner's obviously formalist tendencies find another outlet in his large, equally elegant paintings, overtly influenced by three popular strains of 20th-century abstract painting, namely geometric abstraction, color-field painting and pattern-and-decoration art.
Kenn Kotara, an Asheville artist, also paints in an abstract vein, but his is a kind of stylized, organic abstraction, characterized by smoothly curvaceous lines that seem to reference the flowing currents in bodies of water. These curvilinear markings are set off against subtly gridded fields of lush or muted color. Kotara employs similar markings on sheets of black fiberglass fine-mesh screen material that he cuts into long, narrowly rectangular sheets and suspends vertically from the ceiling in tight parallel configurations of three or more. The latter pieces constitute his three-dimensional contributions to the show.
"Plane & Pedestal" also includes architecturally related ceramic sculptures, drawings and photos by Lin Barnhardt, Mount Pleasant; abstract steel sculptures and paintings by Bill Brown, Linville Falls; wood cabinets, drawings and paintings by Chris Horney, Greensboro; and wooden urns and paintings by Anthony Ulinsky, Raleigh.
■ "Plane & Pedestal" is on view through June 7 at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, 200 North Davie St. in the Greensboro Cultural Center. On Wednesday from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., Kenn Kotara will give a public discussion of his work. On May 20 from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m., the Green Hill Center's curator Edie Carpenter will lead a tour of the exhibition. For more information, call 336-333-7460 or visit www.greenhillcenter.org.
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