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New show zooms in on recent work by local artists
Friday, July 31, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by CARRIE LOVEJOY
Ed Rupard of Chesapeake Beach has several sculptures, like "Dancing with Hoops," on display at "Proximity: Regional Discoveries," a Southern Maryland art exhibition at Annmarie Garden Sculpture Park and Arts Center.
Ed Rupard of Chesapeake Beach has several sculptures, like "Dancing with Hoops," on display at “Proximity: Regional Discoveries,” a Southern Maryland art exhibition at Annmarie Garden Sculpture Park and Arts Center.
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In thinking about the theme of "proximity," one might imagine a circle. Start at the center — Annmarie Garden Sculpture Park and Arts Center — and picture radii filling every last vector.
According to Mimi Little, the Calvert County artist who conceptualized "Proximity: Regional Discoveries," the theme of the art show was initially going to fly for 50 miles. But the circle was pulled in tighter, and so "proximity" came to be about Southern Maryland artists.
Artists were asked to consider this: What does it mean to be an artist living and working in an area with changing tides and seasons and populations? Where does one find a muse?
Responses came in varied forms. Artists answered and they did not answer (or at least did not seem to answer) the questions. And that was all fine and good, as the questions provided a source for at least some cohesion (when too much of it might have yielded a less interesting show) and inspired new work.
On July 24, "Proximity: Regional Discoveries" — what appears to be an unprecedented exhibition of Southern Maryland art — opened in the mezzanine gallery of the Arts Center during Annmarie Garden's monthly date night.
Juried by Paula Amt, the owner of Gallery Plan b in Washington, D.C., what makes "Proximity" unprecedented is really a simple matter of space. Large figurative paintings by two Calvert County artists, Ann Crain and Luray Schaffner, had their own walls, and thus room to breathe — and be properly seen.
It is also a matter of design, for which Annmarie Garden's small programming staff deserves credit. Works were hung from long pieces of wire and placed on an earthy painted backdrop that looked like a long strip of wallpaper. Paintings were finely lit, and they were marked by placards that made no mention of price.
It was the unveiling of a real, authentic exhibition, and the 30 artists showing work, as well as the other artists and gallery owners attending, were thrilled — as much by the large turnout as by the show itself.
Before the Arts Center opened little more than a year ago, local artists had shows in a small, adjacent building. More recently (and currently), the Art Center's café began to host intimate monthly shows. But Little, who is on Annmarie Garden's board of a directors, envisioned something larger. Her push for "Proximity" began almost two years ago. "This is the next step to learning everything you need to do to get into a national show," she said.
Works from artists associated with Southern Maryland's various cooperative galleries were together rather than atomized. Placards, meantime, showed the names of both new and longtime members of the local scene, not to mention some who do not show in galleries.
Room was also made for artists who — sort of — live in Southern Maryland, as well as for artists who have not lived in the region long enough to draw influence. Colleen Sabo of Friendship, for instance, captured local landscapes with Monet-like texture and color. Pat Trioni, who moved to Calvert County from the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 2008, said tourists in her previous place of residence demanded paintings of lighthouse and seascapes and that she was not yet ready to revisit such subjects.
There are oils and acrylic, of course, but also "watermedia," as seen in one of the show's ribbon-bearing paintings of sunlight pouring through a barn by Christina Allen of Lexington Park.
There was diversity: Brenda Belfield contributed a vertical triptych of pieces of a crab basket sealed and covered with white encaustic. Candy Cummings, who runs the gallery at the Lexington Park library, explained how "Child's Play: Astronomy," with its hand-painted game cards arranged in a mathematical pattern, had "something to do with proximity." ("I always overdo it," she added.)
The walls were further decorated with a selection of quotations from the artists' mission statements. One was from Scott Galczynski: "There are many people who think differently from me. I realized that I could learn a lot from them," he wrote.
As seen in "Color Field," Galczynski, a new artist on the scene who brought a young crowd, might now be the closest thing Southern Maryland has to Rothko. One could turn his back to his painting, meanwhile, and find a phantasmagorical landscape by Peggy Walters, who occasionally shows her work at Main Street Gallery in Prince Frederick.
Throughout the gallery, one found sculptures by Ed Rupard of Chesapeake Beach. His "Dancing with Hoops," a snake spinning atop a table spool, is shown on the cover.
Rupard works at Calvert Senior Center, and the first time he showed work was when it was chosen by a juror for the Arts Center's debut exhibition, a national show called "Re.Action."
As the opening was coming to an end, Rupard stood beside a sculpture of a heron titled "He Flies on Burned Wings." The heron's long legs are made from two metal cylinders; Rupard found them and then accidently left them in the rain (so they rusted perfectly). Rupard found the head in a pile of burnt firewood; he took it home and dipped it in polyurethane.
Rupard, in his 60s, explained how he only recently became an artist by accident. For "Proximity," he had been asked to submit a mission statement like everyone else. But Rupard has no mission: The objects come to him and tell him what they want to be.
Instead, he submitted a poem, and it lay on the ground beside the sculpture. The last stanza read:
As an artist it is the driftwood...
…birds, fish, everything imaginable.
I cut, I carve, I sand, I paint.
I AM the boss, I AM the teacher, I AM the wind.
And it works.
If you go
"Proximity: Regional Discoveries" will continue at Annmarie Garden Sculpture Park and Arts Center through Oct. 4. Work has begun on the public art project, "Nesting." Visitors can paint an egg that will go in one of several large nests around the sculpture park. "Wild Things" continues through Aug. 30. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Fee is $3, $2 for senior citizens and children 5-12 and free for children younger than 5. Annmarie Garden is at 13480 Dowell Road, Solomons. Call 410-326-4640. Go to www.annmariegarden.org.
