Calm's Boon - Slow season opens way for local talent

The first few weeks of every year tend to be a slow time for the visual arts in the Piedmont Triad -- a transitional period for museums and galleries, with no major shows to be seen. That pattern has held true this year,

but a few local artists are showing their work in public venues this month.

Figuring it out

5ive & 40rty is filling this slot on its calendar with a duo show of figural paintings, prints and drawings by young Triad artists, Lena Jones and Anastasiya Popova. Cleverly titled "Figure Me Out," it's on view through Feb. 6.

Jones is an undergraduate student in the art department at the UNCG. Popova, who recently earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Salem College, is a gallery assistant at 5ive & 40rty.

Jones gets an A for technique in her paintings of solitary female nudes -- evidently the same young, slender woman in all cases -- striking amusingly provocative poses. In two of them, she wears only cowboy boots and a lampshade on her head while awkwardly positioned on a ladder-back chair, and in another she sits on the edge of a bathtub slugging an unidentified beverage from a green bottle, her face hidden behind the shower curtain. Of seven paintings, the only one that reveals her face is the largest one, in which she sits slouched on a bathroom floor wearing only high heels as she smokes a cigarette and stares insolently at the viewer.

Jones' three untitled lithographs are also technically impressive, and the most intriguing one suggests a narrative set in a Victorian-era brothel.

Popova works in a more expressionistic vein and is at her best when she's most economical with her markings and brushstrokes. Her best effort here is a trio of small square canvases, monochromatic, mixed-media depictions of female nudes titled One of Three, Two of Three, etc. The lines with which she rendered these figures are spare and spontaneous-looking, and the ample white space helps activate and set off the figures.

In Popova's untitled facial close-up -- a mixed-media work on paper, evidently a self-portrait -- she overlays the face with an allover grid that can be read as a wide-mesh wire fence, suggesting literal imprisonment or at least a sense of psychological confinement. Popova's three larger canvases, also portraying women or girls, don't look fully resolved.

"Figure Me Out" is on view through Feb. 6 at 5ive & 40rty, 541-A North Trade St. Call 724-2474

Mysterious narratives

The small gallery memorably named the Electric Moustache, adjoining Krankie's Coffee Bar in the Werehouse, has never been the city's most professionally equipped or operated visual-art venue. Many of the shows here have a thrown-together, seat-of-the-pants quality, most obvious in details such as handwritten wall labels for the artworks. But there are often at least a few pieces in these shows that make them worth a look.

This month's feature exhibition at the Electric Moustache is typical in those respects. A duo show by more young, local artists, Shawn Peters and Savannah Tuttle, it belongs largely to Peters, who made 11 of the 14 paintings on view.

Peters' paintings are chromatically subdued, dominated by shades of gray and brown, and they suggest illustrations for one or more narratives -- children's stories, perhaps, but slightly dark and ominous. Several of them contain figures that hybridize humans with other mammals or birds. In Heritage, for example, a group of dog-headed people poses as if for a family portrait.

Some of Peters' paintings have an unresolved look, and there's an unnecessary redundancy in his two similar views of an igloo-like structure in a murky landscape. His best offering here is a small, irregularly shaped panel painting My Dead Brother. It portrays a man with a reddish horse head gazing sadly over his right shoulder at a cemetery of cross-marked graves on a hillside with bats swooping overhead. Zigzagging down the center is a brief text, in effect a one-line poem: "Oh, brother your ship has sailed to greenest spring."

Tuttle's three paintings are straightforward attempts at photorealistic portraiture, only with amped-up colors. The two larger ones are less successful than the small one, a luridly purple portrait of a short-haired, Asiatic-looking woman who regards the viewer calmly over her bare right shoulder, tattooed with scrollwork designs.

Paintings by Shawn Peters and Savannah Tuttle are on view through Jan. 30 at the Electric Moustache Gallery, adjacent to Krankie's Coffee Bar in the Werehouse, 211 E. Third St. Call 413-3690.

Belated farewell

Today from 2 to 4 p.m. Artworks Gallery will hold a reception for a show that opened early this month, consisting of watercolors by the late Carl Gericke, who was an exhibiting member of the Artworks cooperative. Gericke died last March at 75. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was educated at two prominent New York art schools, the Art Students League and the Parsons School of Design, from which he graduated. He worked as an advertising designer in New York until 1996, when he retired to North Carolina with his wife Karin and settled in King. The exhibition includes landscapes and city scenes from New York, North Carolina and Italy.

Carl Gericke's watercolors are on view through Jan. 30 at Artworks Gallery, 564 N. Trade St. Call 723-5890 or visit www.artworks-gallery.org.