Art for the Winter Months

Blue Spiral 1 Warms the Winter with Artists New to the Gallery By Connie Bostic Blue Spiral 1 is an Asheville gallery specializing in art and artists of the Southeastern United States.  With 15,000 square-feet of classic bright, white space over three floors, it is arguably the region's largest and most prestigious commercial showcase.  Blue Spiral has a tradition of showing nine new artists at the beginning of each new year. This has served the gallery and the arts community well.  Artists new to Blue Spiral get to exhibit in Asheville’s best known gallery, and collectors can relieve the winter doldrums with unfamiliar work. The gallery is also able to test the marketability waters for new artists during a time when attendance and sales are apt to be lowest. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.   This year’s New X Three, along with the other works now in the gallery, may well be the most diverse exhibition ever mounted there. The works range from the carnivalesque to those of quiet elegance to high-tech post-modern.   There are exquisitely crafted tea pots by Mark Nathan Stafford of Tallahassee, Florida, in the form of life-sized portrait heads.  They are functional but it takes serious attention to find out where, on a human head, the tea goes in and where it comes out. There are the obligatory landscapes, the ones in this show proficiently  painted in oil by Luke Allsbrook of Waynesville, North Carolina. My favorite is "Winter Evening with Three Pines." You can feel the cold air.   Glass art with a capital A Glass work can be too pretty and too obvious, but the glass artists in this exhibition make Art with a capital A. Michael Janis and Jim Tate are co-founders of the Washington Glass School in D.C.  Janis uses sgraffito to create surreal images suspended between layers of sheet glass.  The images are made by sifting black powdered glass onto a base of sheet glass, moving the dust carefully about with various scrapers and picks, then firing the layers in a kiln.  The results are two-dimensional works colored with the blue-green of the layered glass with intriguing images.   In "Hanged Man," Janis depicts a fore-shortened figure dangling by his feet by a rope.  The figure swings helplessly over an image of a closed factory.  Meaning is multi-layered in these works.  Janis addresses issues of position and power but with an irony and a fatalistic kind of humor.  Tim Tate works with blown and cast glass and tiny video screens in specimen jars.  He refers to these pieces as “electronic reliquaries.”  They are clean and crisp and look as though they could have come from a laboratory.  Although his work is filled with metaphor, Tate’s approach is realistic, optimistic and pervasively humorous. In "Give and Take," the jar has a cast hand lying horizontally on  top, its fingers open and relaxed.  In this hand lies another hand, this time a tightly clenched fist.  Inside the jar a three-inch video screen plays an image of a seated man wearing a porkpie hat and holding a ukulele.  He repeatedly takes his hat off and hands it to someone outside the frame, who hands it back. He puts it back on and the action begins again.   The videos are deceptively simple.  In "She was Often Gripped with a Desire to be Elsewhere," the horizontal screen shows a young girl from the waist down wearing saddle shoes and a dress with a slightly gathered skirt walking determinedly along a suburban street with a small suitcase in her hand.  It is topped with a cast hand holding a suitcase.   In perhaps the most personally revealing of the works, a cast hand holds an eight ball.  The video shows a building collapsing and rebounding and collapsing and rebounding all over again.  It is called "My Love Life Thus Far." Inscribed paintings   Mitchell Lonas’s large inscribed paintings of birds nests are elegant.  Those on flat dark backgrounds sing.  The line is fluid and certain.  They evoke feelings of safety and home.   Home is important to Lonas.  Born in East Tennessee, he has lived in Asheville since 2006. In an interview, Lonas said his father always kept horses.  About a decade ago his mother gave him a nest made from horsehair from the tails of his father's horses. He tried drawing the nest, then painting it, but was only satisfied with the image when he began carving it into flat panels of painted metal.   With a degree from the University of Tennessee, Lonas spent 15 years as a portrait painter. He was good at it.  Three weeks after completing his first commission he quit his day job in a gallery to paint full time.  "I was never a starving artist," he admitted, "but in a way I paid my dues with this work.  It was sometimes frustrating, but it gave me the opportunity to really learn to paint."   Eventually Lonas began to feel his portrait work had become rote and formulaic.  He wanted more.  He realized he wanted to go back to his roots, back to the nest he had looked at for 10 years and to the fields and the pine trees of his East Tennessee home.  His latest work is an image of a pine that he says he has looked at "all my life."   Making the work with unconventional materials has presented challenges.  Lonas’ father builds the frames for his works.  The aluminum that covers the supports is painted by a professional airbrush artist.  The tools Lonas uses to carve and scratch the images into the aluminum he makes himself.  "It is the only way to get the light reflections I want,” he said.   There is a lot to see at Blue Spiral for the next two dreary winter months, including an exhibition of cups by 16 artists. They come in all shapes and sizes and are just the thing for a warming cup of tea.