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review
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SCENIC SURROUNDINGS
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by Kevin Nance
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At first glance, the trio of artists in “Scenic Surroundings,” the beautiful new Arts Connect exhibit at the Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, might seem birds of a feather. Gary Jennings, Connie Tucker and Dan McGrath are all landscape painters of similarly high skill levels. They all look carefully at nature, appreciating the myriad ways light falls on landscapes and bodies of water, descends on horizons, illuminates clouds. They are all fine technicians, composers and colorists. They all work very hard.
And there the similarities largely end. Each in his or her own way has a distinct temperament, personality and perspective. The fact that each works in a different medium from the others puts more air between them. The greatest source of differentiation here, however, is how each artist responds to what they see, and how that tells us as much about the painters as it does about what they paint. Of the three, Tucker, who works in watercolor, has the lightest, most abstract, most graphic and most vividly hued approach to her subject matter. Even when she’s painting late afternoon or night scenes (as in “August Sunset,” “Blue Hues” and “Moon Lit Sky,” all gorgeous), you feel in her work an underlying sunniness. |
She’s at home in, and at peace with, all these locations. I very much admire, too, the crinkly, spider-webby effects she achieves on some of her surfaces — “Sky on Fire” in particular — which gives them texture and depth thatsuggest old parchment maps.
Jennings takes the opposite tack, producing exquisitely somber pastels whose subtle mysticism shades into outright melancholy. His river scenes, such as “Chimney Top Creek, Red River Gorge,” “Creation Falls” and “Greenbrier Morning,” depict concealed and enchanted places, sunlight barely penetrating canopies of trees. My favorites of his pieces here, “Evening” and “Morning Breaks Softly,” are meltingly soft, conveying a depth and delicacy that will take your breath away. He’s the most turbulently psychological of these three artists, and his works feel, more than the other two, like self-portraits of a sort, projections of his mind. McGrath is at once the most distant, most old-school and most technically sophisticated of the trio. His oil paintings on board traverse a stylistic range somewhere between the Impressionists and the Ashcan School; it’s difficult to view his “Haystacks in the Snow” without thinking of Monet’s haystack paintings, while “The Old Drawbridge” might have impressed Robert Henri. His skyscapes, such as “Cloud Study,” “The Farm Pond” and “The Marsh Track,” are quietly ravishing. Although I didn’t sense as much of the painter’s unique presence in these works as I did in those of the other two artists here — perhaps that individuality is yet to come — I coveted them instantly. |
Connie Tucker: Sky on Fire
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Gary Jennings: Morning Breaks Softly
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Dan McGrath: Haystacks in the Snow
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