May Featured Exhibition
Nathan Pickerell
oils
Nathan is an oil painter who translates emotions and questions through abstracting his environment. Abstraction is used to create visual language systems. Through repetition, emphasis, reference, and invention, meaning can be projected onto these visuals.
Like poetry, the paintings are definite but have only ambiguous interpretations.
This dichotomy of ambiguity and systemization acts as a cosmological structure, forming a foundation for Pickerell to ask questions through psychological, spiritual, and/or philosophical lenses.
Tension between abstraction and representation creates a space where many things are true at once, spectrums of truth. Reflecting the multitudes of Pickerell’s reality, identity, and perception.
Artistic tools like geometry, universal visuals, and contrast create technical tension and sensation. At the same time, these universal, thus ambiguous visuals, are further metaphors for interconnectedness of all things and systems of the natural world.
Tension should be understood as the spectrum which the elusive magic resides in.
Thinking in terms of spectrums is more useful in the Pickerell experience. Not only in the search for interest, but also in the desire to stretch one’s understanding of reality and mind.
April Featured Exhibition
Roura and Bryan Young
Flint Hills through the eyes of a watercolorist on yupo and a fine art woodworker
Lawrence, Kansas artists, Bryan and Roura Young, began hiking in the Flint Hills as newlyweds, falling in love with the open sky and dramatic vistas.
Roura’s first painting of the Flint Hills was a study of the pinks, the purples, and the blues that were created by the variations within the colors of the grasses, a dash of wildflowers, and shadows formed by the undulations of the hills. As Roura began to further investigate the landscape with her art, small details such as rhythmic patterns created by seed heads, the interconnection between plants, and the relationship between the distant horizon, the sky and the foreground became part of her work.
Bryan’s artisan marquetry/parquetry woodworking inspiration comes from a different direction. He begins by distilling the forms of the hills into an abstract design. His focus is on the unique geometry of the hills, using the varying grain patterns and tones of wood to construct his images. While smaller in scale, Bryan’s pieces are dramatic works of art, with many bringing to mind the stark forms of the Flint Hills after a controlled prairie burn.
Gallery Artists
Art of the Week
Brad LeDuc
Work for this exhibition began as a commentary on the experiences of physical transitions in space. I contemplated questions including, “What are the most traveled paths my body takes from point A to point B?” What are the most significant passages I make?” In reflecting, I was also drawn to the significance of “place,” contrasting my childhood home in Clyde, Kansas with my current home in Topeka, Kansas, and the impact those two places have had on who I am today.
The two-hour drive between Topeka and Clyde has been a well-traveled path over the last 15 years. The journey from point A to point B is a near meditative experience, full of many views I have enjoyed passing by over the years. Making the trek is a welcomed voyage of familiarity; old and new. The transition between the two places and the work before you are symbolic in terms of the similarities and differences between who I was and who I have become. Each work in the show has two horizontal bands of gradient color which represent these transitions between the past (top/muted color gradations) and present (bottom/brighter color gradations). They overlap spatially (vertically) and fade, symbolizing the connections we have with place, our past, our present and their connection to the passage of time.