by Bob Bahr, PV Arts Council member There are no humans in Janice Schoultz Mudd's paintings now on display at R. G. Endres Gallery, in the Prairie Village Municipal Offices, but human fingerprints are all over all the paintings. Her paintings of aerial views of coastlines show land and water but also harbors, street grids, and other signs of civilization. And that concept--civilization--seems to be the lens through which much of her artistic vision is projected. When a sailing ship is shown navigating waters near modern seaside developments, old and new collide. Additionally, Mudd depicts such scenes by utilizing images from Google Earth. Schooners and satellites have little in common except that they both represent achievements of civilization. "The Horse,"acrylic with collage, 24 x 24 in. Likewise, the image of the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric earth sculpture in England, features prominently on another Mudd piece titled "Horse" that seems based on satellite imagery. And while "Red Light Camera" was inspired by an incident with a toll bridge in New York, the piece sits well beside her satellite imagery. The viewer might be tempted to read more into the bits of ephemera attached to the canvas in a dance of paint and collage, but sometimes a smashed bottlecap is just a smashed bottlecap. "I was crossing the Tappan Zee bridge and got caught by a red light camera," Mudd recalls. "I was thinking about something else and didn't exit to pay the toll, and all the lights went on in this big structure above me. So that painting is about the experience of it all--there's roadmap information, and that bottlecap, because you have drinks while driving, and all the trash, all the things you bring with you when you are on a road trip." "Red Light Camera," acrylic with collage, 36 x 48 in. A trio of paintings depicting planets and moons may seem devoid of a human touch, but the imagery was inspired by photos taken by the Hubble telescope, and one of the paintings features inscribed shapes of constellations. "I was just so amazed by all the images out there in space and how beautiful they were," Mudd says. "I was enamored with the colors from the filters they were using on the photos. Also, I was thinking about how we came to be. Did we get here by accident? I do believe that we were invented by God, but I really started thinking about that. in one that have all the constellations. How did those people of ancient civilizations, from South America to Egypt, navigate? How did they see all this stuff? When they looked at the sky, how did they differentiate all those stars?" When Mudd sees the world from different or unusual perspectives, she wonders how humans engaged in their environment. An aerial view may be Mudd's way to ponder how early inhabitants of Earth survived winters and found food. "A painter is a visual person," she says. "You see these things and you think about them. I'm more fascinated in the internal workings of the mind and the way that life experiences combine with the world that we live on, and how it all comes out in the wash. There's no big message. I take it from a factual point of view. This is what happened. This is how things changed. It's more historical and the way that people think and respond and live, largely due to circumstances." From left: "Searching for the Blue Moon," "Cadmium Night," and "Breakthrough," all three are acrylic with collage, 40 x 30 in. Part of the fun of taking in a Mudd painting is examining all the elements of her collages. As long as something is relatively two-dimensional and capable of being affixed to a canvas, it is fair game. "I have boxes of things," Mudd states. "I collect things all the time. I never know what I might want to use or what's important. People see me and they think I lost a contact. No, I'm just looking for interesting things on the ground, in a parking lot, interesting shapes or something that could be representative of something in a painting. It's somewhat indiscriminate." Or perhaps simply instinctive. Mudd doesn't seem interested in nailing down the meanings of her paintings too tightly, but to pretend that she isn't making an artistic statement would be a serious mistake. Even when the meaning of a passage in one of her paintings seems mysterious, it is succeeding, based just on that very fact. Artists make you think about the world and human experience. Mudd does that in ways both straightforward and oblique. Mudd's work is part of a group show on view in the municipal building on Mission Road until March 1. "Fissure,"diptych, acrylic with collage, 60 x 40 inches each Bob Bahr is a member of the Prairie Village Arts Council. He has written about visual art for several national magazines. He lives with his family in Prairie Village and paints a variety of subjects. He wishes there were a NYC-style bodega in the Shops.
by Bob Bahr, PV Arts Council member It's always fun to ponder what an artist is saying with her or his art. Is that a horse from a cave painting? Is that guitar exploding into bright colors a celebration of…what? Who are these squirrels bearing gifts? It's fun, but possibly doomed. Artists often don't want to say, or don't completely know why, they chose this motif or that material. The show currently on view at the R. G. Endres Gallery, in the Prairie Village Municipal Offices, offers plenty of chances for the visitor to contemplate the vision three very different artists present. Amanda McCollum prints her digital art on 9 1/2" x 9 1/2" canvases, offering portholes into her vision of charismatic animals, handsome humans, and Art Deco flourishes. The saturated colors of vibrant flower blossoms hint at the mood or personality of models bathed in colored light in some pieces. Birds, in other pieces, suggest peace, predation, prettiness. Squirrels bear gifts of nosegays, foxes and wolves lounge in beauty. The effect is old, new, modern as a digital device and classic as a Tiffany window. Heather L. Lowe muddies the waters separating abstract art and representational painting, turning a wolf into a flurry of colorful confetti, confronting the viewer with a white canvas with vertical slashes and smears that are quite possibly birds on a wire. An imposing trio of large canvases seems utterly abstract until one notes the suggestions of water ripples in one piece, and the unmistakable triangles of sailboats bent in the wind. Janice Schoultz Mudd paints with acrylics, but affixes every manner of things onto the surfaces of her paintings. Sometimes these elements, ranging from a smashed bottlecap to small crescents of rubber, from wires to molds of the textures of who-knows-what, are meant to depict something; other times, they are merely the right element to enhance Mudd's compositions. Coastlines and harbors emerge, street blocks are suggested, ancient boats/dragons offer dangers in her map world. Each piece offers much food for thought. So feed your mind. It's easy to visit the exhibition -- it's a mere stroll through the municipal building on Mission Road. The show featuring these three artists will be on view until March 1. Bob Bahr is a member of the Prairie Village Arts Council. He has written about visual art for several national magazines. He lives with his family in Prairie Village and paints a variety of subjects. He wishes there were a NYC-style bodega in the Shops.
By Bob Bahr, PV Arts Council member Yes, the sunflowers are beautiful here in the fall, but one of the most consistently beautiful things in this part of the country, year-round, is the sky. The wispy clouds of summer don't always shield us from the sun, but they rake the sky with cottony streaks. The incredible peaches and cyans of sunsets of winter end our workdays with a soft lightshow. The flat fields serve up a warm platter for the brilliant skies above. But it's easy to stop seeing the everyday beauty. Donna J. Paul is here to help. "I want the viewer to say, 'Wow, there really is something to see in the landscape of Kansas, and the Midwest, and Lawrence in particular," says the artist, who grew up in Ohio but has lived in the Kansas City area since the mid-1970s. "It's not an in-your-face beauty, but the more you look and the closer you see, the more you find there." Paul works in both pastels and oil paints, and she pursues a kind of accessible abstraction in her work that suggests as much as it describes. Although she says she may prefer pastels over oils, her oil paintings have a marvelous way of somehow holding onto the vibrant color associated with pastels and the direct feel of pastel sticks--each mark on her oil paintings seems visible. The viewer can see her hand in the work. "Pastels are my first love," says Paul. "I have drawers and drawers filled with pastels at home. In the summer, I can work with the windows open, which is important with pastels. It's a health issue. [The dust from pastel pigments is toxic for both lungs and skin.] I work with oils in the winter. The subject matter doesn't really matter in terms of medium." Quite a few of Paul's pieces that are currently on view at the R. G. Endres Gallery, in the Prairie Village Municipal Offices, are landscapes. Paul reports that many were inspired by her morning walks with her husband around the outskirts of Lawrence. If a viewer can see individual pastel strokes with a careful look at her pastel paintings, the look of her oil paintings done without a brush is even more striking. Paul almost exclusively paints in oils using some sort of palette knife or scraper. "It started when I wanted to be bolder and looser in my art, and there's no other way to be with a palette knife," she says. "This technique suits the Kansas landscape--flat land, lots of sky, big shapes." Paul employs the typical kind of palette knife, with a triangle or blade shape and a wooden handle, but she also uses a bowl scraper and a soft, plastic, wedge-shaped tool from Catalyst. If she uses a brush at all, it's a big, inexpensive one from the hardware store. Her color palette is not extensive; Paul places a warm and a cool version of the primary colors (red, yellow, blue) on her palette before painting. She also adds an unusual color such as persimmon or Montserrat orange to shake things up. "I'm a sucker for new paint colors, and I'll try one surprise color per painting," she says. "I'll add something bright and in-your-face and sneak that in." Her current influences are pastelists, including Albert Handell and two pastelists from Scotland: Tony Allain and Norma Stephenson. "What I get from them is 'big shapes, bold colors, and extrapolating from the landscape rather than copying it,'" she says. Paul has taken workshops with the New Mexico-based Handell, and she took a drawing class art an arts center in Lawrence, but she's mainly self-taught. "I retired from being a pharmacist about 12 years ago, and I knew I needed something to keep me busy," says Paul. What's next for Paul? She has plans to do a series of night sky paintings in pastel. For these, she will work on pastel paper that is already toned either in a dark salmon or black. Don't count on these paintings showing famous landmarks. "What attracts me to a scene first, like most people, is the contrast between light and dark," says Paul. "But at the same time, I like to pick subject matter that is kind of out of the way. You may just walk past it and not think too much about it. These everyday landscapes--I want to make the mundane special." Bob Bahr is a member of the Prairie Village Arts Council. He has written about visual art for several national magazines. He lives with his family in Prairie Village and paints a variety of subjects. He wishes there was a NYC-style bodega in the Shops. |
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