LANDSCAPES ARE TREATED WITH VARYING DEGREES of literalism in “VIEWS OF COLOR,” a five-artist exhibition at the ADA Art Gallery. The participants, all local except for Californian Andrew Faulkner, distill vistas in different ways and with disparate results. The show, which was curated by Edith Graves, is keyed as much to pattern as color.

That’s especially true of the work of Karen Schulz, a textile artist, and Helen Zughaib, who’s showing prints. Schulz’s quilted pieces are abstract, but their motifs and hues suggest cityscapes. The vibrant “Make of It What You Will” juxtaposes smears of red with stacked rectangles in the color of concrete. The stylized “Blue City” is the most complex of Zughaib’s pictures. A flattened and compressed clutter of doors, windows, and fluttering cloths, the scene is held together by the checkerboard pattern of the pavement that leads the eye (and potentially the robed man at the front of the composition) into the urban jumble.

“Blue City” is the most vertical of Zughaib’s prints, which aligns it with Ellen Sinel’s paintings of upward-thrusting forests and grasslands. Light, notably from a sunset-red sky, is important in these pictures, the most realistic in the show. Sinel has long painted forests, but the two paintings of grasses are less expected. Depicted in closeup so they fill the frame just as fully as the trees do, the blades appear both fragile and dynamic, and their sharply defined spikes are set off by milky sunlight.

Most of Sinel’s hues are soft, but bolder than those of Karen Deans, whose landscape-like abstractions are mostly pastel. While strong blacks feature in some of her pictures, such standouts as “Fiona’s Cup” are executed in a muted mix of oil and wax crayon. The pictorial elements are diverse and intricately tangled, yet unified by the hushed palette.

Faulkner’s pictures are the simplest of the lot, but distinguished by their fluid colors. Working with well-diluted oil paints, the artist depicts elemental geological forms that appear to melt into sky and sea. The most striking of Faulkner’s three contributions, “Teal Point,” is emblematic of the entire show: Under a pink sky, a blue outcropping liquefies into pure color.

I hope to see you on October 15th!

As always, please contact me with any inquiries about artists, prices, or additional inventory of work.

Art is available to purchase and may be taken home

after the reception or the following day.

Contact Edith@EdithGraves.com to RSVP and inquire about artists.

VIEWS OF COLOR

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