Author: Sarah Sargent

Susan McAlister uses a number of approaches to landscape, from direct physical representations to more nebulous suggestions of place, to riffs on the basic forms and patterns that are the building blocks of the natural world. “My process is essentially the same whether I’m working representationally or abstractly,” says McAlister, whose work is the subject of “Canopy,” now on view at Les Yeux du Monde. “I’m finding form, I’m pushing color, I’m layering materials, I’m thinking about the relation of all of these elements together.”

The plein air tradition of sketching and painting out of doors is central to McAlister’s practice. “When I take my walks in nature,” she says, “I think about the shapes that are happening and the way the light moves through those shapes and how a vine travels up a tree and continues over your head. I’m considering all of this and what it’s like being engulfed by nature and how that makes my heart feel.”

While outside, McAlister also forages for natural found objects, which she uses as inspiration, sometimes incorporating them into her assemblages, thus rooting them in a specific time and place. “Faunus I,” for example, features a feather, petal, and bee. Originally inspired by a visit to the Matisse room at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., McAlister took the concept of cut-outs and ran with it, adding three-dimensionality into the mix to produce her gorgeous explosions of layered cut paper.

Luminous vistas of the Blue Ridge cloaked in fuzzy haze are conjured up from a combination of McAlister’s observation and memory. “These wooded landscapes are about my childhood. I grew up where my playground was the uncut forest outside my door. That kind of tangled landscape, that’s orderly but also disorderly, is endlessly appealing to me.”  

In “Near and Far,” the haze has been replaced with rain-washed crispness. McAlister uses extraordinary brushwork here, with bold expressive slashes, smears, and clumps of paint that describe the varied mountain terrain of woods, meadows, and streams. 

“Meeting in the Woods” depicts the sort of tangled woodland that appeals to McAlister. In this rollicking work, the scene has shifted from the gently sloping hills of memory seen in “Wooded Way,” “The Engagement,” and “Evening,” to more rugged Montana. McAlister has amped up her brush work accordingly, with slashing strokes that describe the wind tossing the trees, and add points of visual interest to the work.

“Spring Shadows & the Forest Floor” seems to exist on the knife edge between abstraction and representation. McAlister has visually nailed the sense of wind, using large brushes to produce blurry contrails of paint along with quick daubs of green that suggest fluttering leaves. 

The artist’s muted palette perfectly embodies the temporal and atmospheric conditions she wishes to convey. Light greens pinpoint the season as early spring. Dove gray represents the recesses of the forest interior. Elegant inky blotches describe roots, branches, and tree trunks, tiny flecks of cerulean blue and stark white brighten the sky with intense, pure pigment. In the upper left quadrant, the absence of green implies that we are at the edge of a clearing or body of water where the land opens up and the view of the sky is more expansive.

McAlister’s palette of sunny pastels is derived from Bonnard. It’s a challenging color scheme to make serious, particularly for an artist who states, “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be sweet. I’m most pleased when my paintings read as bold and expressive.” So, she tempers her palette’s prettiness with the introduction of duller shades, gesture, and layering. You can see this in the rectilinear zones of “Edge of the Forest.”

“Come to the Woods” has a curious power that seems to build with each repeated viewing. The initial impression is of a work that is delicate and fragile, thanks to its pale colors and softly undulating shapes. But, the complex arrangement of pink, blue, green, and yellow and the interplay between painted surface and line, create interesting visual relationships. With its tessellated forms and passages that cascade down the picture plane, the work is really a deconstructed landscape.

Four paintings—“Vert,” “From the Open Window,” “Lost in the Forest,” and “Lush”—are hung together on the wall. McAlister did this to create a bigger expanse of painted surface. But the quartet’s juxtaposition, with two representational works and two abstract ones, hits at the crux of McAlister’s oeuvre, which is really about painting in and of itself, not one specific style. You see in these works, the ease with which the artist switches gears and her incredible facility, no matter how she’s painting. The “what” she’s painting remains a constant, however.

“Landscape is where my heart is,” she says. “It’s what I want to talk about.” As the works in the show reveal, McAlister uses various inventive means to “talk” about it, but one thing is clear, she is using a decidedly contemporary language to do so.

Coral reefs are wondrous marvels of natural beauty. They are both living things and ecosystems for a myriad assortment of other creatures, and are a vital link in the chain of life. It’s estimated that 1 billion people benefit from coral reefs in the form of food, coastal protection, clean sea water, and income from tourism and fishing.

With “House on Fire” at Quirk Gallery, Kiara Pelissier uses glass to draw attention to the existential threat the earth and all its inhabitants are facing as our climate changes and temperatures rise. Pelissier focuses on the devastation happening to coral reefs around the globe. These beautiful animals are struggling to survive in an environment that is becoming untenable. Mass bleaching events, unknown until the 1980s, are now common occurrences in our oceans, which absorb 93 percent of the heat trapped by CO2.

Each coral is made up of polyps that are attached to a reef at one end, and have an open mouth surrounded by tentacles at the other. One of the most remarkable things about coral is its symbiotic relationship with algae. Each coral polyp contains millions of algae cells, called zooxanthellae. The coral provides them with an environment in which to thrive and photosynthesize, which, in turn, helps sustain the coral. At night, corals become active, extending their stinging tentacles to capture floating plankton.

Coral polyps are actually transparent—it’s the zooxanthellae that provides the pigment that gives coral its vivid and varied color. Coral can be hard or soft. It lives and grows connected to other corals. Soft corals resemble plants. Hard corals use the calcium in seawater to form outer skeletons that become the structural basis of a coral reef. Bleached coral is not dead, but without the algae inside, it is more at risk for starvation and disease, and if the situation doesn’t improve, it will die.

Taking the title of the show from Greta Thunberg’s famous 2019 Davos speech, Pelissier continues the metaphor of the burning house with the introduction of a portion of a roof. Her intention is to bring what’s happening out of sight, beneath the sea, quite literally home. Pelissier’s roof is mostly white, interspersed with cobalt, amethyst, and lime-green tiles—the white alludes to bleaching and the other distinctive colors appear in certain corals when they experience heatstroke. The message is clear: The roof, our home, our planet, like the coral, is in mortal peril.

The heatstroke colors appear again in the dramatic sheaths of glass rods at the opposite end of the gallery. It isn’t until you see that these pieces are all titled “Scream” that you note the urgency to the upward thrust of the rods. Pelissier wants us to understand the direness of the situation: The coral—out of sight and out of mind—is screaming for our help.

“Anthropocene” refers to our current era of human domination, and features drooping clear polyps placed against a mirror. From a visual viewpoint, it’s a dazzling display of silver and glass, but it’s also a powerful memento mori. The polyps, drained of color and deflated, bear little resemblance to healthy coral. They’ve expelled the algae living in their tissues as a reaction to stress. Transparency is the final stage in coral’s death spiral before all “flesh” is gone and only a skeletal superstructure remains. It’s impossible to look at this piece without seeing ourselves reflected in the mirror, just as it’s impossible to look at what’s happening to coral without confronting our role in its demise.

“In My Lifetime,” spans decades from the 1950s to the 2020s, and presents a series of 13 glass coral clusters. Pelissier suggests movement by incorporating slightly mushed polyps into her arrangements to mimic the swaying of ocean currents. The early clusters are luscious explosions of colored glass. It’s not until the 1980s, when the first mass bleaching event occurred, that we begin to see white clusters. After 2000, there are no more entirely colored ones, just predominantly white with only a few bright-hued polyps. The last three have lost not just their color, but most of their mass, leaving behind skeletons.

A video features Pelissier producing one of these blooms. It’s magical watching the molten bubble of glass being pushed down onto the arrangement of upside-down polyps, and then the whole weighty thing lifted and plunged into the fiery glory hole (the name given to the furnace used for reheating the glass during its manufacture). You can feel the heat and sense the effort and determination involved in producing blown glass pieces of this scale and complexity.

Fire and heat have special relevance to those who work with blown glass. Pelissier herself has experienced the profoundly deleterious effects of exposure to hot temperatures, developing an allergic reaction to the heat she needs to produce her work. It got so bad, she almost abandoned glassblowing altogether, pausing her practice for a full six years. Fortunately, she has figured out a way to limit her exposure and also limit the amount of time her 2,000-degree furnace is on—a necessary piece of equipment that she acknowledges is not exactly green. She is helped in this effort by the fact that her current pieces are composed of numerous smaller elements that form each coral cluster, allowing her to organize her production in stages so as to use the furnace as efficiently as possible.

Like many of us during the pandemic, Pelissier turned to Netflix for some welcome diversion. Watching Chasing Coral introduced her to the plight of coral and inspired this body of work. It is a galvanizing documentary, well worth your time. The artist is donating a percentage of sales to coral reef rehabilitation and research.

A pair of shows on view at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia shine a spotlight on arts, culture, and the very existence of two groups of Indigenous people in North and Central America. “N’Dakinna Landscapes Acknowledged” and “Look Three Ways: Maya Painted Pottery,” curated by Adriana Greci Green, The Fralin’s curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas and Dorie Reents-Budet, research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, center on work drawn from the museum’s collection.  

“N’Dakinna Landscapes Acknowledged” takes an innovative approach to presenting landscapes by members of the White Mountain School of painting, which flourished in New Hampshire during the 19th century. Similar to, though lesser known, than the Hudson River School, it shared some prominent Hudson River artists. Featured in this show are works by White Mountain painters Benjamin Champney, Samuel Lancaster Gerry, Samuel W. Griggs, and Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon.

As the robust American landscape painting tradition reveals, the land—its beauty and vastness—was a source of enormous inspiration and pride for newly arrived settlers. America’s great expanses represented a present-day Garden of Eden that was theirs to inhabit and tame into cultivation. This reverence was far-reaching, extending even to those who might never actually see these places in person. Champney’s paintings, for example, were often reproduced as chromolithographs that were widely distributed. 

This perspective ignores the fact that the land had been inhabited for millennia by a whole host of Indigenous peoples who had very different ideas about the land and its stewardship. N’Dakinna (homeland) is the Abenaki’s (People of the Dawn Land) name for this area, which they have occupied for 13,000 years. The Fralin show asks us, when looking at these beautiful paintings, to consider the Abanaki and their relationship to the land. 

As we navigate the choppy waters toward a more accurate understanding, the trick is to hold two different realities in one’s mind, acknowledging the experience of loss—of people, land, and culture, known as territory acknowledgment—and yet appreciate these paintings for what they are: beautiful landscapes that provide an incredibly valuable snapshot of what pre-industrial America looked liked.

Champney’s “Moat Mountains from Intervale” depicts a broad vista of cultivated valley before a backdrop of the dramatic geological formations known as the Ledges, with mountains beyond. The picture is surprisingly small given the grandiosity of the scene, but there’s an appealing intimacy to its size. The other works, oil on paper studies, provide charming pastoral vignettes, with Gerry’s view of a twisted tree against a blazing evening sky possessing a moodiness reminiscent of the almost contemporaneous German Romantic painters.

In addition to the paintings, two maps included in the exhibition speak to the Indigenous people’s relationship with the land. One, a topographical map Greci Green produced in collaboration with Chris Gist of UVA’s Scholars Lab, features the Abenaki and neighboring nations, the Haudenosaunee and Wabanaki, spelled out in a striking orange font across the map. The bold, flat writing effectively subverts the map’s imposed borders, proclaiming whose land it really was. 

“My own work is very much focused on Indigenous Native sovereignty and treaties,” says Greci Green. “When I think about art and landscape, I see it through those lenses.”

The other map, made in 1852 by cartographer Franklin Leavitt, features superimposed reproductions of the paintings placed where they were made, as well as a vintage postcard and a stereographic photograph. These latter two, which feature Abanaki posing for the camera, are souvenirs of the tourist industry that emerged around them. “These pictures of Abenaki basket makers at tourist spots highlight how these artists remain there in this landscape and are engaged with the local touristic economy,’’ says Greci Green. 

“Look Three Ways: Maya Painted Pottery” explores the rich tradition that flourished on the Yucatan Peninsula during the first millennium. Included in the show are works from The Fralin’s impressive collection of this art form, dating from 250–900 CE. Over the years, certain of these pieces have been displayed in the museum’s study center for the benefit of students, but the collection has never been displayed in this fashion before.

The vessels vary from everyday uses to ceremonial objects important to feasts that could be celebratory in nature, or important political events between different groups. They share a similar palette of red, black, soft terracotta, and cream, and the shapes of the vessels are simple: rounded bowls of different sizes, their fubsy form derived from gourds, some footed, and tall cylindrical drinking vessels. 

The title of the show alludes to the three ways the works are analyzed by scholars: interpreting the Maya hieroglyphic writing that decorates the vessels, the style of the pot—it’s size and shape—and finally, instrumental neutron activation analysis which can identify the place where the pot was made.

There is a poignancy to what is on view at The Fralin, an unmistakable sense of loss and displacement, of precious relics of obliterated human experience. But there is also a vibrancy in the artistry, a chance to sense what was so widely destroyed, and appreciate those who came before.

Likening their artistic collaboration to dancing the tango—following, giving, and then stepping back, Michelle Gagliano and Beatrix Ost decided to call their venture “Symbiotic Tango.” Chroma Projects is currently showing a selection of Gagliano/Ost works that give us a taste of what the collaboration looks like. A more extensive “Symbiotic Tango” show will be presented by the William King Museum of Art in Abingdon in December.

At Chroma Projects, the work is hung inside its bank vault. This intimate shrine-like setting is the perfect backdrop for pieces limned, framed, and splashed with gold. This precious metal’s glint enlivens an artwork visually, but gold also connotes high value as it pertains to the object and its message. For Gagliano and Ost, this high esteem also extends to the collaboration itself, which has enriched them both in untold ways.

“Before this, I was never drawn to abstraction,” says Ost. “But, now I’m in it. I’m in Michelle’s abstract world.” For Gagliano, working with Ost’s narrative has been expansive. “I never studied surrealism,” she says. “But getting to know Beatrix’s life, and seeing how it extends on to the canvas has been an incredibly enriching experience.”

How did the Gagliano/Ost collaboration come about? Like just about everyone else during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two artists were struggling with isolation. So in November 2020, they hatched a plan to begin working collaboratively, transforming the ensuing months into a time of flourishing artistic output and creative growth.

One wouldn’t necessarily have thought to put the two artists together. Gagliano produces shimmering atmospheric, abstract compositions, while Ost’s ornate narratives boast a complex surrealist iconography that she uses to explore the human condition. But, this stylistic divergence works to their advantage as each brings her unique perspective to the project. “It’s like a collision of contemporary surrealism and abstracted nature,” says Gagliano.

The women do share many significant similarities. Both derive real sustenance from their practices, which have provided them not only a living, but an identity and psychic fulfillment. They are also each the mother of three sons. But, perhaps most important for their practice, Ost and Gagliano both grew up on large farms: Gagliano on a dairy farm in Upstate New York, and Ost on a farm in Bavaria that specialized in cabbages used in sauerkraut. This birthright has engendered in both artists a deep reverence for nature in its many forms—its bounty, its fury, and its fragility.

Gagliano and Ost work sequentially, completing paintings that they then exchange for the other to add to. To let go of something you’ve labored over to completion, giving it to someone else to work on as they wish, would give most of us pause, and in the beginning, it was challenging for the two. The artists were leery of stepping into the other’s painting for fear of mucking up the vision. It got easier as time passed and they became more in tune to each other and appreciative of the process.

The “Dissected Presence” series of paintings was begun by Ost. The works feature densely packed forms and images from her rich visual lexicon, creating a sumptuous allover effect. In two paintings from the series, an ancient-looking plaster idol reminiscent of the stylized Cycladic schematic figures is affixed to each panel. Their significance isn’t directly spelled out, but they seem to allude to a feminine goddess along the lines of Gaia. All of the works in this series are shot through with diagonal shafts of gold added by Gagliano. These metallic embellishments add a dynamic thrust of movement. They also disrupt the illusion of three-dimensional space, without obscuring the original composition.

Begun by Gagliano and finished by Ost, the series with the same name as the show, “Symbiotic Tango,” has nine paintings. Here, the focus shifts to the surfaces—Gagliano’s forte. She says she was inspired by the James River, with the churn and splash of paint intended to evoke water flowing over rocks. The explosions of paint resemble swirling clouds of vapor and the work can be taken to represent an emergence of some kind. The paintings boast hidden narrative tidbits—faces, birds, strange toothy creatures, a disembodied hand—that one must really look for in order to see. These partial glimpses of recognizable things amid the chaos of swirling medium suggest an excavated wall where only fragmentary sections remain, with the rest degraded or covered with dust or mud. Ost revels in these instances where the abstract meets the surreal. “That’s how the mind works,” she says. “It understands both the abstract and the surreal. It’s the eyes that want order.”

Working as an artist can be a very solitary pursuit. Many spend hours alone in the studio trying to figure things out. With another artist in the mix, it’s not only companionable, but there’s another person invested in the process to act as a sounding board. This is helpful in completing a piece by reinforcing the decisions and choices involved in its creation. It’s also easier to appreciate the artistic output and derive pleasure from its creation because you have someone else experiencing the same reaction and reinforcing one’s own. “I get so much from her and she gets so much from me,” says Ost. It’s a joint endeavor of listening, trust, and support.

The moment you enter Second Street Gallery, you appreciate the variety of techniques featured in “Mirabilia naturae (Wonders of Nature)”—the precise, elegant line of Lara Call Gastinger’s works of paper; the poetic, emotive quality of Giselle Gautreau’s paintings; and the velvety tones and photographic verisimilitude of Elizabeth Perdue’s palladium prints. Each medium and style has its own formal and evocative allure, while also being ideally suited to capture and convey nature, a subject with which these artists are deeply engaged.

The differing approaches work very well in concert throughout the show, and specifically in the grid arrangement of 30 6″x 6″ squares that form a joint, site-specific piece. “We wanted a way to represent a cohesiveness in the show and came up with this idea of one gridded part of the wall that would embody all three of our styles together,” says Gastinger. “We love it. It shows everything from the detailed work of mine to the dreamy photographs of Elizabeth, and then the moody landscapes of Giselle.”

The individual works that make up Gastinger’s “Seeing Plants: A Year in Virginia (January-December),” feature florae as they appear during a given month. Her graphically symmetric arrangement of specimens is derived from the illustrated botanical plates of German scientist Ernst Haeckel. Gastinger uses the dry brush watercolor technique (a small amount of paint—without water—is used with a brush) to produce the extraordinary precision. Just look at her wispy paradise flower in “Seeing Plants,” or the thin hair-like filaments on the fiddlehead fern stems in “Emerging Ferns.” In this and the aforementioned series, Gastinger limits her palette to sepia, which produces varying tones of gray. In other works, she introduces color. Throughout, you marvel at Gastinger’s ability to artfully join scientific veracity with a finely tuned sensitivity to the myriad aesthetic qualities of her subjects.

In her contemplative encaustic paintings, Gautreau uses tonal values to create mood. She downplays detail in these softly edged, atmospheric works, keeping her palette muted and focusing on dusk or twilight when shadows grow and light is diffused. The multiple layers of oil and encaustic that Gautreau employs expand the visual depth while augmenting qualities of luminosity.

In “Virginia Nocturne with Fireflies,” the insects of the title appear as pinpricks of brilliant bluish light against a backdrop of inky conifers. Hazy silvery light from the moon illuminates the sky and shines on a small glade in the foreground, creating the effect of a spotlit stage. Here, a patch of springy clumps of grass with worn areas of dirt is conjured out of lush brushstrokes in vivid green and yellow. A simple composition, the piece evokes childhood memories of the ineffable magic of lightening bugs and moonlight in a summer garden.

“With landscapes, there’s a point where the viewer might connect with them and feel some familiarity with something,” says Gautreau. “But if I get too specific, unless it’s something they have a personal connection to, they lose interest. So, I walk that line between making work that’s rooted in something specific, while also leaving it open to interpretation.” 

Palladium printing is an old process, prized for its beautiful effects and archival resilience. Traditionally, large-format cameras are used because the technique requires the negative to be the same size as the image. Perdue uses a Calumet camera with either 8″ x 10″ or 4″ x 5″ negatives. When she’s ready to print, after first processing her film, Perdue paints an emulsion containing palladium salts and a light sensitizer onto watercolor paper. After it dries, she lays the negative on top to make a contact print. She then places this in a light box for exposure, with the addition of a developer. How long it stays in there depends on the desired effect, but it can range anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or even more.

“I love the tones, the gradations and the grays, and also the texture of the paper. None of it is digital,” says Perdue. “It’s all very tactile—very hands-on. It’s old school. I love that about it.” While palladium printing may be complicated, it’s also simple in the sense that the artist can be involved and in control of the entire process.

Perdue gathers her subject matter on walks, looking for things that “shine in their simplicity.” She selects just one stem or branch to photograph at a time, producing a form of portraiture. “I love celebrating the ephemeral quality of a single bloom, or shoot, and capturing it in a medium that is believed to last for up to a thousand years,” she says.

There’s an unmistakable elegiac quality to “Mirabilia naturae.” We see it in the desiccated magnolia leaf, the fragile fireflies facing collapse, and the somber grandeur of a lone magnolia bloom. It’s easy to revel in each approach, and also in the wonders they present, and it’s very hard to leave the gallery without being more mindful, observant, and appreciative of the ever-fascinating natural world.

Lara Call Gastinger, Giselle Gautreau, and Elizabeth Perdue are featured in “Mirabilia naturae (Wonders of Nature)” at Second Street Gallery through May 19.

“Tom Chambers and Fax Ayres: Everything is Extraordinary,” currently on view at Chroma Projects at Vault Virginia, features two artists using distinctive approaches to alter and enhance photographs in order to capture a mood, an evocation of a place, objects, or some mystical imaginary region.

Fax Ayres enjoys playing with perception. This is evident in his transformation of ordinary objects into something special, and the playful shifting back and forth between reality and fiction that’s a recurring theme throughout his work. Photographing each piece incrementally, Ayres works on small sections, taking as many as 200 photographs to end up with the 100 good ones that comprise a finished image.

“I like the fact that they can appear to be paintings or photographs,” says Ayres. “I have a definite affinity for some of the Dutch painters who did those hyper photorealistic paintings.” 

To achieve the crystalline quality of his images, Ayres uses light painting. With the camera mounted on a tripod and tethered to a computer, Ayres holds a remote trigger in one hand and a small flashlight in the other. He opens the shutter and skims the light across the surface of the area he’s photographing, throwing the object into high relief. The shutter speed depends on a variety of factors, including the surface area size, how shiny or dull it is, and even how far away it is from the camera.

“I keep the shutter open with a manual count,” he says. “Then I close the shutter and look at the image to see if the highlights look right, if the texture of the surface is revealed in the way I want, etc.”

One can see the result of the process in the remarkable reflecting, haptic, and even emotional qualities Ayres is able to wrest from the ordinary, everyday objects he uses. To preserve the clarity of the work, Ayres has his images printed on smooth, matte aluminum.

At first, “The Usual Suspects” appears to be a sober and imposing work, but then we notice a plastic monkey and parakeet amidst the oil cans, padlocks, and weights. It’s a delightful touch that disrupts the unrelenting browns and grays of old metal by adding color, humor, and frivolity.

In “Portal,” Ayres takes this levity further, creating a faux landscape of fake trees and grass, a dog figurine, and a macabre novelty lamp, all set within a car gear part that’s resting on an old-school style level. These functional objects, made from steel and wood, shine under Ayres’ exacting eye—their humble ordinariness transformed into beauty by proximity to the garish artificial scene they’re paired with.

Ayres steps outside the studio with the striking “Birch Trees” and “Pool Gates.” In these works, intense lighting and hyperrealism work together to produce a curious artificiality that adds drama and suspense.

In his allegorical photomontages, Tom Chambers captures the innate beauty of young girls in a way that exalts them while preserving their innocence. In Chambers’ hands, this central theme yields powerful images.

According to Chambers, “the photographs present something that is possible but not probable,” a land where girls rule (or at least have agency) and feral beings are safe. He photographs his subjects in the studio, while placing them within landscapes that tend to be rugged, northern coastal settings—the perfect foil for the tender girlish pulchritude depicted. 

In some images, the girls are either holding or interacting with natural beings—a wolf, birds, fireflies, which are in peril because of demonizing, loss of habitat, or pollution. In these mysterious tableaux, one has the sense that the girl is in control; a junior Mother Nature tending to and protecting her charges. “In each of my images, I’m going for my own expression of a feeling through telling a story,” he says. “I hope the viewer also connects in some way emotionally with his own personal interpretation.”

Chambers clothes his models in garments that sync perfectly with the timbre of the work. Their frocks, muted in color and style, have a timeless elegance about them that’s unusual and piques our interest. One girl, in a plain white shift, sports an arm in a matching sling. It’s unexpected and provocative, engaging the viewer’s curiosity and dispelling any whiffs of cloying sentimentality such enchanting subjects might arouse. Another girl wears a black and white checked dress that echoes the speckled hens at her feet. Still another wears pale pink, the same shade as the teapot she holds.

There’s an unmistakably elegiac quality to the work. The fragility depicted, whether of nature or young girls, is under constant threat. In these brave doe-like visages—serene, fearless, immutable—we see beauty certainly, but we also see strength. And yet, this strength is tempered by our understanding of the girl’s unequivocal vulnerability. It is this last quality together with the subjects’ patent goodness that makes them the ideal incarnation for humanity in these beguiling examples of memento naturae.

Though Sarah Lawson lives far from the coast in Nelson County, they have been keeping tabs on the climate crisis for some time now, following it internationally in the news, and even mapping the movement of a particular iceberg in Antarctica. At home, Lawson (a contributor to C-VILLE) has been monitoring the changes occurring in the creek that runs through their property. The land belonged to Lawson’s grandparents, so they’ve known this stream all their life and remember how it was and how it’s changed. 

Lawson’s show at New City Arts, “Salience, the sea,” addresses two different themes associated with the climate crisis. Mortality salience, meaning the knowledge that we’re all going to die, and also, the sea, or oceans and bodies of water generally—the flashpoints where the effects of the climate crisis are most apparent.

Lawson acknowledges the intrinsic sadness of the subject matter. “There’s a lot of unprocessed death and grieving I think we’re feeling as a society in response to COVID,” Lawson says. “I’m currently studying social work at VCU. A lot of studies about mortality salience talk about how, ‘Yes, it’s horrible, we’re all going to die. How could  there possibly be a silver lining?’ The silver lining, from a clinical standpoint, is that if you acknowledge this existential fact and embrace it, you can use that to really make the most of the time you have.” 

The larger works in the show are intended as a devotional on grieving, for what has been lost and what is to come. The smaller works started as part of a daily collage practice Lawson undertook when they turned 38 last February as a way of confronting their own mortality and staying in the moment. They titled this body of work using a numerical system: The first number is the chronological order in which the piece was done, followed by days in the year, followed by Lawson’s age. Lawson typically did these at the end of the day, while processing what news they’d read, the work they’d done and other quotidian occurrences. Gathering together the accordion files where they kept clippings, sorted by color, pattern, and texture, they went through them to see what jumped out. Beginning with “a very loose gaze,” Lawson would sort through, creating a smaller stack of things they wanted to incorporate. “I allow my subconscious to move things around in a certain way, trying to be as light-handed as possible in determining what’s going to come,” Lawson says.

Collage appeals to Lawson because it’s finding meaning in something discarded. It’s also open access—anyone can collage. “Something as simple as scissors and a glue stick can really affect someone’s day, or how they view the world. I just love that. It’s a really simple, easy to access form of self-expression.”

In some works, Lawson highlights the imagery represented in various scraps of paper, with others they subvert what’s being depicted, pairing it with pieces of colored paper to produce more abstract studies (“23/365/38,” “20/365/38,” “108/365/38” (a self-portrait), “70/365/38”). With both approaches, the inspired arrangements are striking. 

Lawson will often use the same picture twice to create a mirror image. Sometimes, this is exact, as in “6/365/38,” where the heads of two fantastical beasts form a portal from which a hand extends. In other works, like “29/365/38” and “54/365/38,” they alter them slightly, retaining the original shapes and outline. 

When they incorporate the human form, Lawson does so with a big helping of witty surrealism. In “22/365/38,” a colossal Audubon-like bird is picking up, or dropping, cartoon figures from or into an Italian town. In “123/365/38,” a woman’s head and hand emerge from a fat tubular offshoot of a heart, framed by a spray of mushrooms. “59/365/38” presents two fastidiously turned-out 18th-century soldiers sitting primly astride a large airborne fish. The two disembodied eyes in “31/365/38” grab the viewer’s attention, as they seem adrift on a sea of matter that could be cellular, geologic, or elemental.

It’s hard to pick a favorite from Lawson’s visual bounty, but there’s something so captivating about “89/365/38”—the modern building placed in the midst of a woodland setting. Lawson cut out a circle in the center, creating a void in the midst of the sleek corporate exterior. It also has the effect of a giant mirrored disc reflecting the surrounding landscape, and creates the impression of space vacillating from foreground to background.

Considering one’s own death and the collapse of the natural world is pretty bleak stuff. But the richness of Lawson’s work, which does just that, suggests it doesn’t have to be. If we can be clear-eyed about the realities of our future, we can thrive even if that future is grim. “The overall macro level problems that we’re facing from an ecosystem standpoint are horrific, but if we ignore them it just makes it worse,” says Lawson. “Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of darkness, but I try to practice being more comfortable within that and using it as an impetus to imagine alternatives.”

For artist Janet Bruce, the forced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity to turn inward, to seek solace in nature and delve into a deep exploration of color. Directing her attention to the color theories of Goethe and Eugène Chevreul, as well as modern and contemporary colorists, Bruce produced over 360 color studies. This extensive foray is recorded in both a binder thick with diagrams, notes, and photographs, and the astonishing 13- by 8.5-foot installation “Color Study: On a Southern Horizon,” which features 247 of Bruce’s color analyses in a grid arrangement. These provocative artifacts are on view at Les Yeux du Monde in Bruce’s luminous show, “Locus Amoenus.” Latin for a place of safety and comfort, the title references not just a physical place—in this case, Bruce’s studio and the natural landscape she inhabits—but also a state of mind.

Hard work and introspection is evident in Bruce’s thrilling “Tree,” in which she pulls out all the stops. Bruce uses pigment and brushwork to describe the effects of light and shadow and delineate the features of the landscape, like the shape and texture of the vegetation or the crooked progress of a stream, but also to impart a sense of energy. Lavender and white zig-zagging lines buzz across the surface with fervid exuberance. 

Bruce’s color choices and pairings are beautiful in themselves, but they also have a distinct veracity. This is notable in her treatment of sun versus sunlight. Low on the horizon, the sun has a golden cast, but when it hits the forest floor, Bruce adds green to yellow to achieve the peculiar, almost day-glo, effect of sun raking across moss.

“Tree” alternates between representation and abstraction. We perceive a woodland scene with foreground, middle ground, and background, while admiring the dazzling stew of pigment and gesture that roils across the surface and elevates an ordinary scene into an extraordinary painting.

The perfectly calibrated composition “All Four Seasons in One Day” draws on all of Bruce’s talent. Though a more abstract work, it shares with “Tree” a similar organization with a kind of Y shape taking the place of the central tree. Bruce balances the work chromatically with lavender passages in the upper left and lower right, and gray in the opposite quadrants. At the center, cinnamon and rosy purple converge to form the Y. A calligraphic swish of black meanders in and around its periphery, concluding in a squiggly flourish at the bottom. 

To say Bruce uses pale yellow and white to compose her sun does a disservice to the complex passages she comes up with. The eye causes these mélanges of hues to coalesce into an impression of a particular color, but make no mistake, the artist’s colors are the sum of many parts. To suggest wind-tossed branches fleetingly obscuring the sun, she adds flicks of paint—cream, pale green, and brown. Her rosy aura of rays staining the sky perfectly captures how the heavens look at sunset when it clears after rain. The pigment’s application throughout the work conveys the effects of weather and atmosphere—sheets of rain, blustery wind, raw temperature. Gray and lilac suggest a front pushing across the sky or the unrelenting gloom of heavy cloud cover. 

“High Sun Day” may be a small work, but it grabs your attention. The bold, yet lyrical brushwork and nuanced palette of yellow and a tantalizing green strikes the perfect chromatic and gestural chord. Within the tangle of yellow strokes, you can see the speed of application and get a sense of brush moving paint along the surface. The areas where the pigment is more thickly applied act like highlights, with the thinner areas appearing to dissolve into the background.

Bruce’s inspiration for her series “Four Seasons” comes from Nicolas Poussin and Cy Twombly—she embraces both the pastoral landscape tradition of Poussin and Twombly’s formal approach to materials and technique. Bruce has synthesized and distilled her seasons so that what we really get is sense memory impressions. Whether it’s winter’s frosted suspended animation, summer sun on greenery, a tawny scrawl suggestive of fall foliage, or the shimmering luminism of “Spring,” each painting summons up a distinct time of year through abbreviated means.

A handful of the artist’s “Materiali/Immateriali” prints hang in the show, but there are others available for viewing in the gallery’s flat files. These are well worth your time. Produced using color viscosity and silk aquatint (printmaking techniques), you can see the ravishing effects in the ink’s movement across the plate—drizzly in some places, vaporous in others—as well as the riveting interplay between the different hues. 

Like so many of us, Bruce had very different plans for 2020. According to gallery director Hagan Tampellini, Bruce had been accepted into the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts residency program in Auvillar, France, but due to the pandemic, the program was canceled. Undeterred, she moved on to plan B: finding her locus amoenus in her own backyard.

Untrained and subject to the dual, almost insurmountable, constraints of economics and Jim Crow, the artists on display in “Of Another Canon: African American Outsider Art” at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center possessed a creative fire. Despite cruelly stacked odds, Mozell S. Benson, Rudolph Bostic, Bessie Harvey, Anderson Johnson, Mary Proctor, Bernice Sims, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Annie Mural Tolliver, Mose Ernest Tolliver (aka Mose T), and Ruby Williams persevered in their art, creating work that brims with raw authenticity, joy, and passion.

With the show’s title, the curators place the work, from the collection of Richard and Ellie Wilson, in its own alternate, yet equally valid canon to that of Western art history. They also raise questions about the term “outsider art.”

While it’s a generally accepted way to refer to art made by self-taught artists who operate outside the traditional art world, in this case, the work speaks not just to the individual artist’s experience, but to similar experiences shared by a large group of people. It was a 1982 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980,” that played a significant role in elevating the art of self-taught African American artists and creating a market for their work. Nearly all the artists represented in this show are now featured in major museum collections. Mose T is widely known, and Williams, who sold her paintings off the back of a truck along with her produce, was the subject of an extensive New York Times obituary in August of this year. With this recognition, I wonder if the artists benefited in any substantial way from their artwork. It’s likely they did not, but it gives me hope that other, similar artists coming up behind them will.

Entering the gallery space, the eye is immediately snagged by Williams’ electric “Piano Playing Cow I Give Better Buttermilk.” I’m betting Picasso, who reputedly once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” would envy this odd-footed orange bovine sporting black and white keys running along its back and a toothy, mask-like face. Nearly as riveting, “Ms Bonnie Bon Bonnie with Purse” is a simple composition made exceptional by her weird and wonderful hands.

Mose T, Sudduth, and Johnson share a similar approach. For the most part, they rely on vibrant color and bold shapes to render figures against flat expanses of pigment or just plain plywood—as in the case of “Self-Portrait with Willie Mae.” T’s sophisticated sense of color and composition is laid bare in this painting and in his “Portrait of a Woman with Baby.”  A similar sensibility is echoed in the work of Sudduth, who used a combination of house paint and mud from his yard to create his jaunty self-portrait, and his likeness of a girl sporting a stylish hat and holding a violin. Annie Mural Tolliver (T’s daughter) and Sims take this approach and expand it into spiritual and narrative directions. Tolliver’s stylized “Garden of Eden” employs a dramatic palette and striking arrangement of forms, while Sims’ “Edmund Pettus Bridge,” painted from memory (as was all her work) with childlike simplicity, is made more powerful knowing the artist was an eyewitness to the seminal event.

Harvey’s “Garden of Eden,” the only sculpture in the show, is made from a tree root. The label describes how root sculpting plays an important role in African American vernacular art. Here, Harvey daubs paint across the surface, and uses the longest root for her serpent. It seems to veer like a malevolent tube man toward the viewer. Harvey takes advantage of a knob in the wood to form the nose, adding stuffed animal eyes surrounded by painted lashes, a row of pearls for teeth, and a jaunty orange earring. This almost human face is creepy, thanks largely to the teeth, with a totemic quality that suggests a spiritual purpose.

Bostic’s “Egyptian Scene” and “Garden of Eden” take us even further into visionary territory. The first, a tondo painted on the cover of a flour container (Bostic worked at a baking company), is studded with Egyptian iconography that identifies the reclining figure as a dying pharaoh. Bostic mixes his colors to add volume and highlights, and to produce a range of hues that tend toward the richer jewel tones. Indeed, the works, with figures outlined in a Sharpie, resemble stained glass. The second painting, on a rectangular piece of cardboard, features an ornate composition, chockablock with the wonderfully rendered animal and human cast of the Judeo-Christian origin story. Bostic tops it off effectively by creating a trompe-l’oeil gilded frame with yellow squiggles on a black border.

Other artists also used materials that were at hand and free—odd bits of plywood, leftover house paint, a tree root, or worn-out clothes. Though employed out of necessity, these humble materials have a grittiness that add both visual and emotional weight to the work. In addition to information about the works, the accompanying labels also provide brief accounts of the artists’ lives. They were universally challenging, rife with enormous obstacles. And yet, from these terrible circumstances art was produced—a vital outlet for the artists and a record of their existence. It’s an extraordinary testament to the creative drive and to the resiliency of the human spirit.

“One of the best things about collaborating with another artist is I learn a great deal about the other person’s sensibility to materials, aesthetics, and mark making,” says artist Diego Sanchez. His work is currently on view at the Quirk Gallery, together with fellow Richmonder Mary Scurlock.

In “Conversations,” each artist has eight paintings on display, which give the viewer enough information to understand and appreciate the artists’ individual approach and style, while providing a key, of sorts, to the intricate dance of give and take apparent in the 10 joint pieces. The artists worked in layers, on top of one another’s contribution, exchanging paintings back and forth three to four times, keeping a tally in pencil on the back of each work. 

Looking at the individual pieces, you might not put the two artists together. Sanchez favors bold color and geometric shapes, while Scurlock prefers a more streamlined palette and blurred edges. But spending time with their paintings, you begin to see that both artists employ a similarly diverse selection of media, and devote the same attention to developing their surfaces with layers of paint, wax, and paper.  

Sanchez’s paintings are hung in the front part of the gallery, where the Quirk’s soaring space can easily accommodate their exuberance. Scurlock’s are in the back, where the ceilings are lower in a quiet, more meditative area that suits these contemplative pieces.

One marvels at all that’s going on in terms of color, composition, and medium in a work like Sanchez’s “Composition #151.” The easy allure of turquoise and cobalt is tempered and elevated into something much more sophisticated by passages of dun and gray. The rectilinearity of the overlapping planes is subsumed in places by broad brushstrokes. Perfect orbs of blue dance across the surface, encountering more amorphous circular shapes. Partially obscured targets are “visual representations of ‘centering,’ of being mindful and present in our busy lives,” says Sanchez. They also summon Jasper Johns, an artist Sanchez admires, as does the mini crosshatch rectangle. Sanchez makes this his own by seasoning it with calligraphic scrawls of black and an odd tawny blob. Near the center, a lavender pastel rectangle dotted with burnt-orange dots more than holds its own against the more saturated passages.

“Composition #141” has a completely different effect. Here, it appears Sanchez has scraped off the background paint, leaving behind an expanse of fractured lines reminiscent of ceramic crazing. Whether it’s the light hue, or the network of lines that turn this flat expanse into a topographical map, the background appears quite distant with the strange shapes rendered in aqua, gold, and burnt sienna, floating above.

You might think it would be hard to compete with all the bright color and bold marks at the front of the room, but Scurlock’s paintings have a slow-burn heft and a presence that really gets under your skin. She relies heavily on the use of rubbings in her work. Instead of headstones, she goes after things like manhole covers, signs, and inscriptions, or even natural items. It all depends on her surroundings and what she wants to capture and convey about it, because, as she explains, “The intention of these paintings is to create a feeling—a space that mimics a place.” 

Back in the studio, she begins by adhering old paper—letters or clippings she’s saved—onto her panels. She then applies color, followed by the rubbings. These are done on delicate rice paper and are transparent, so when they are embedded in the surface they’re still legible. “The way I work, you put one thing down and something else changes, then you have to change that area so it works with the other area,” says Scurlock. “So, it’s hard to save things. But even though you can’t see them, they’re there. The idea is still there.” 

In “Ydra,” your eye is drawn to the graphically bold Greek lettering, especially the delta and zeta at center right that stand out against the vaporous clouds of pigment. There is the suggestion of houses on a hillside, evoking a Greek village. But it’s fragmentary, obscured here and there by blotches and daubs of shimmering paint. Similarly, incised lines and scratches form words or shapes, but they’re disjointed and incomplete. Just as memory does not present a perfect image, Scurlock intentionally renders this Saronic island in indistinct form.

With “Hatteras Village,” Scurlock introduces faded pink and dull green into the mix. Here, the composition is flatter, reflecting the topography of the subject. Again, we see bits and pieces, the eaves of a house possibly in the upper left, writing at the right center, and various circular shapes and squiggles scrawled across the surface.  

Within the collaborative pieces, you recognize the distinctive traits of each artist. There’s the color and geometric forms favored by Sanchez, but they’ve been softened, their tones and edges blurred by Scurlock’s hand. In doing so, she disturbs the integrity of those shapes and hues, shifting the timbre of the work to something more tenuous and uncertain.

Many artists would balk at the idea of letting go of a piece they’ve labored over and offering it unconditionally to another to augment as they wish. But the exercise can be remarkably rewarding, introducing new techniques and approaches, and producing exciting collaborative work.