COMPOSITIONS IN COLOR  - FALL GROUP SHOW
​September - November 2025
Review
      by Kevin Nance
​From the cave drawings to the present-day gallery scene, color has been a key element in painting.
Over the last few decades, however, certain blue-chip contemporary artists — Jasper Johns and Anselm Kiefer, to name two — went through periods of putting out largely monochromatic work, often emphasizing gray and somber earth tones. And a good deal of conceptual art, with its emphasis on the cerebral over the sensual, has further pushed color to the sidelines.
 
“Composition in Color,” Arts Connect’s fall group exhibition at Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, says pish-posh to that. These local artists, working mostly with paint (with a few notable exceptions), seem quite giddy at the opportunity to ravish our eyes with vivid, hot, saturated, intoxicating color, and they seize it with gusto.
 
The standouts here include Clay Wainscott, whose “Chilis on Sink,” rendered in his signature style (which uses a bespoke acrylic painting technique that lend a deep sheen of strangeness to ordinary objects) triggers my covetousness; Connie Tucker, whose yummy “Gourds” accomplishes something similar with watercolors; Brian Connors Manke, whose cheeky and overstuffed “Nature Isn’t Really Interested in You” deconstructs and satirizes traditional landscape 
painting and Dalphna Donnelly, whose trio of thicket-like nature paintings dance with characteristic effervescence in the liminal space between representation and abstraction.
 
Joining these artists in that liminal space is  James Shambhu, whose vaguely Cubist color-field approach to studio nude painting has become his own signature in recent years. It’s remarkable how many delicate effects he’s able to create with this seemingly heavy-handed and reductive technique — especially in “Lost in the Color Field 007,” in which the figure and face of a young man emerge from the thick daubs and slashes of paint with a mysterious poignancy. Shambhu is working his way toward something significant in his career as a painter, maybe a breakthrough; this is one more step along the way.
 
Elsewhere I was delighted by “Arcabaleno” and “Cerchio Cromatico,” two wonderfully composed photographs of hot-air balloons by Laura Zecchin; three exquisite mixed-media collages about birdwatching — “Hummingbird,” “Toucan” and “Hornbill” — by Sonja Brooks; “Fire on the Water,” a needle felting piece by Jane Hutchens whose color palette and otherworldly strangeness recalls the work of William Blake. Valerie Timmons’s “Homage to Magritte” is a welcome shot of wit in the show, while Cate Wagoner’s “Tribute to Wolf Kahn,” a vivid autumnal landscape, showers its yellow and gold tones on us with abandon.
Chillis on Sink - Clay Wainscott
Gourds - Connie Tucker
Nature Isn't Really Interested in You - Brian Connors Manke