ART ON THE TOWN: MAY EDITION.
Edited by Colin Schmidt
Photography by Ian Platz
On May 3rd, the city of Wilmington held another edition of Art on the Town that showcased masterful artwork and music from regional artists. The event, attended by hundreds of people, featured a variety of abstract and expressionist pieces, along with more traditional compositions in oil and watercolor.
At the bottom of the Loma District, Bloomsberry Flowers featured the work of Pike Creek resident Cindy Brinker. Displaying many lively abstract pieces consisting of layered swirls of greens and aquamarine, Brinker chose to contrast these images with softer tones of yellow. The achieved effect captured the relief she claims to have felt underwater during painful bouts of chronic arthritis. Having previously worked in acrylic, Brinker chose instead to experiment with the media of encaustic, which entails the use of pigments and beeswax mixed over a searing griddle. In her piece “Aquatic Oasis IV,” Brinker poignantly portrayed the healing effects of water on her long road to recovery. In homage to her mother and grandmother, she also showcased a variety of blooming flowers, which she maintained were brought to life by her newfound method.
Artist: Cindy Brinker. “Aquatic Oasis IV”. Gallery: Bloomsberry Flowers.
A few doors over at the 2nd and Loma Leasing Offices, James Wyatt gave his own take on abstract expressionism infused with a contemporary urban flair. Influenced by his appreciation of photographs of human faces, Wyatt made the cover of this month’s Art Loop guide with a stylized rendition of the face of a Native American donning a traditional and ceremonial crown of flowing feathers. The Native’s face seems to transcend both space and time as it hovers over a blank background, the contours of which vibrate with colorful strokes of red intermingled with hints of orange and green. In a deliberate attempt to combine the assaulting nature of abstract expressionism with the more contemporary style found in graffiti art, Wyatt extended the feathers from the headdress beyond the border of the canvas to striking and intimate effect.
Artist: James Wyatt. Gallery: 2nd & Loma Leasing Offices.
Wyatt provided an equally impressive and opalescent depiction of baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Robinson’s face wore a challenging and stoic gaze above a body engulfed in streaks of undulating lines that appear to project out of the late Dodger legend, accentuating the poise and self-determination with which Robinson broke the color barrier upon his arrival in the segregated sport. A final example of his mesmerizing style was the smiling face of a young male swallowed by a surrealist mirage of colorful and abstract shapes. The way the abstracted collage protruded out of the top of the man’s head collided powerfully with the potent mix of color observed both on and around his body.
Artist: James Wyatt. Gallery: 2nd & Loma Leasing Offices.
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In a departure from the abstract works hanging at Loma, the Grand Opera House exhibited the reflective and Realist work of Wilmington artist Samuel Coppola. In an exhibit entitled “Inspirations,” the breadth and scope of Coppola’s far-reaching talents met to provide a descriptive and heart-felt story of self-realization and redemption. Currently imprisoned, Coppola creates pieces that explore the interaction between constancy and change through realistic subjects that combine Romantic and post-Impressionist sensibilities.
Coppola’s oil painting “Covered Bridge” depicts a rural morning. The composition begins its movement in the foreground, where a bridge spans a stream and slowly retracts into the background in a tranquil fashion. The piece seems to hint at the possibility of transition from one place to the next. The surrounding tree lines are bare near the edges of the bridge but become bright and green as they move outward. The intimation of the coming of the spring is dominant in this context, given the spiritual and intellectual strides achieved by Coppola.
Artist: Samuel Coppola. “Covered Bridge”
Coppola shows his Romantic sensibilities in the piece “Angel with Whip/ St. Angelo Bridge.” The work focuses on the Hadrian Bridge at night and explores the melancholic solitude of Lazzaro Morelli’s afflicted angel. Muscular, virile, and youthful, the figure poised in the traditional contrapposto appears mostly detached from the light and dazzle surrounding the Eternal City. It seems as if the prospect of eternity, or at least guarding it with his arsenal of whips, afflicts the subject with a desire to flee his current station by use of his immobile wings. This intense longing for flight is tacitly strengthened by the geography of the painting. By setting the picture in the heart of Rome beside the Tiber River, Coppola allows his intense Romantic longing for travel to become an outlet for his desires, which are close kin to the unmet but equally-felt wishes of the piece’s subject.
Artist: Samuel Coppola. “Plowing the Field”. Gallery: Grand Opera House
In yet another display of his impressive versatility, Coppola explores the simplicity of pastoral work and life in “Plowing the Field.” The piece centers around a farmer clad in early 20th-century raiment being pulled by a team of horses atop an old industrial plow. The realist approach taken by Coppola is evidenced in the monotony of the surrounding background, which is broken only by a dull, dark maroon farmhouse in the distance. The acute sunlight scattering onto the worker from above attests to the artist’s Impressionist heritage.
Artist: Samuel Coppola. “Plowing the Field”. Gallery: Grand Opera House
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Down by the RiverFront, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts challenged visitors’ perceptions of themselves and their world with an exhibit entitled “An Implied Narrative: Contemporary Figure Drawings,” by artists Mark Stockton, Jason Maas, and Sean Lyman. Curated by the museum’s own J. Gordon, the exhibit implores the viewer to question the nature of social relations. By presenting faces and groups of people free from any contextual background, the personalities of each subject and what they come to represent become at once salient and questionable.
The exhibit opened with a larger-than-life charcoal drawing of baseball legend Pete Rose by Mark Stockton. The piece invites the viewer to question the importance of the retired athlete in the lives of the American people. Set against a blank background, Rose appears in his Cincinnati Reds uniform as he gives his audience a challenging mug and grabs his crotch defiantly. By focusing on this uncouth display of manners, Stockton confronts Rose’s dual role as both a sports villain and a source of hometown and athletic pride.
Artist: Mark Stockton. “Pete”.Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, DuPont I Gallery An Implied Narrative: Contemporary Figurative Drawing Curated by J. Gordon
In a progression focused on celebrities, Stockton arranged sketches of four to five historical and cultural figures around the image of an animal totem. By presenting characters as diverse as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Amelia Earhart, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bobby Fisher, Stockton asks the audience to question the relative significance that the works of the represented figures have on contemporary life.
In a final collection exploring death and cultural celebrity, Stockton depicted the archetypes of assassination, lunacy, suicide, and serial murder. His illustrative examples include Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVeigh, and The Son of Sam. By contrasting the images of people who have come to personify evil, revolution, passion, and talent, Stockton once more removes them from any sort of recognizable and tangible context to demand of the viewer a self-inquiry as to who these people really are to history and society at large. In this way, Stockton intelligently stresses the fatalistic and taxing nature of celebrity, marking intellectual and societal progress as high in price, evidenced in the lives of the deceased individuals whom he chose to represent.
In a similar sociological vein, the work of artist Sean Lyman asks the viewer to question the relationship between the individual and society. Lyman chose to focus on the topic of anonymity as he presented his figures in striking and defiant poses with covered faces. A thin and youthful male, armed with a shovel and ready to strike is depicted with a goat’s head. Here, the dichotomy between the innocuous nature of rural livestock and the violent posture of city living becomes an expression for the question of who and what we really are. In a highly symbolic gesture, Lyman reminds the viewer of the animalistic nature of humanity, as represented by the goat’s head. It is the head of this animal, however, likely to be taken as less evolved given its passive and herding nature, that confronts the viewer with open amicable eyes. The human body, on the other hand, flaunts the evolutionary and creative achievements of the human species, both in his upright stance as well as the use of man-made tools. These, however, are both violent and aggressive in nature, thus creating a severe reaction that asserts the ugly side of so-called “civilized society,” while reminding the audience of the brutish and latent instincts to which people so often fall prey.
Artist: Sean Lyman. Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, DuPont I Gallery An Implied Narrative: Contemporary Figurative Drawing Curated by J. Gordon
In another magnificent display of local and regional talent, the city of Wilmington, along with the many downtown venues involved, hosted a night that celebrated thoughtful and high-quality art. The next edition of Art on the Town will take place on the first Friday of June.