First Thursday Opening Reception: March 6, 5-8pm
Artists Talk with Carol Benson and Michael Knutson: Saturday, ?????. 16, 2pm
????????OTHER ARTISTS TALKS
MARCH 5-29 — MAIN GALLERY
Adventures in abstraction
— Carol Benson and Michael Knutson —
Counterpane 18 — Carol Benson, 2023, oil on gessoed paper, 24" x 18"
A powerhouse team of artists, painters Carol Benson and Michael Knutson present their latest variations on established themes, each artist deepening engagement with a serious and persistent fascination.
Benson extends her exploration of complex and playful compositions that reference quilts—traditional women’s work, the largely unsung, handmade projects that females create in the home. In her Counterpane series, Benson draws on Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, The Land of Counterpane (in which an ailing child imagines the colors and patterns of his bedspread to be a land of adventures) as an inspiration for the paintings and their titles. Additional influences are the artist’s interest in color interplay, patterns and puzzles and her natural and urban surroundings.
In three large, horizontal oil paintings on wood panel, quilt imagery merges with landscape. Here, Benson exploits the horizontal orientation to convey the patchwork impression of cultivated land seen from above.
Michael Knutson’s recent paintings involve a mixture of deliberation, physical drawing, digital manipulation, chance and impulse. They are his most dense and intense works to date. “I wanted them to have the weight of oil paintings,” he says—though the works are realized in watercolor—“to be a bit overworked, even to brush against the ugly.”
Certainly, the ugly moniker is debatable, as Knutson’s uncanny virtuosity with watercolor results in fractal images of daring complexity, saturated color and remarkable luminosity. To view them is to enter a world of stain-glassed wonder; the mind boggles at the spatially complex and kinetic images. Like the inner workings of perpetual motion machines or antique clocks, they are impossible to fully grasp. This makes one more aware of the process of looking, which is what the paintings may be about, Knutson allows.
Zigzag I — Michael Knutson, 2022, watercolor, 31.5" x 41"
Benson and Knutson, who are married, joined Blackfish in 2004 and 1997, respectively. This is their eighth two-person show.
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GALLERY 2
Kinetic sculptures
— Stephan Soihl —
Transparent Columns - Spaces Variable — Stephen Soihl, 2024, brass, aluminum, glass, resin, wood, motor, microcontroller, 20" x 18" x 18"
Kinetic artwork can take many forms and exhibit have many concepts as it is being displayed in a visual setting. It is undoubtedly "time-variable", i.e. Its appearance varies with the passage of time. It may be motorized, with its motor controlled by a computer program. Or it could be simply driven by the wind, if it were an outdoor piece.
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JAMES HIBBARD GALLERY
Cosmic Leaves - Miniatures and Giants
— Kanetaka Ikeda —
Giant Cosmic Leaf #12 — Kanetaka Ikeda 2021, mix media assemblage 52”x 51”.
This exhibition is a visual manifestation of further exploration into the world of Cosmic Tree. Cosmic
Tree is a visual world of my own creation that is inspired by a dream I had years ago where the cosmos
appeared as a continuously changing tree like form. It is a world where suns and stars are the fruits and
flowers and where invisible lines of gravity are the vines and branches of this heavenly tree. In my art,
I have not tried to recreate this memorable dream, but create artworks inspired from it as compositions
in paintings, drawings and wall assemblages, and as organic forms in sculptures and installations. In
this “Cosmic Leaves- Miniatures and Giants” exhibition, the subtheme of Cosmic Tree, the cosmic
leaves, are further explored and developed.
Blackfishers Doing Cool Stuff
See what Blackfish Artists are involved with outside the gallery this month.