Your Turn: Color, Geometry and More

Thanks to those of you who responded yesterday and today to my invitation to send in links and images of your color-focused work. Below is some of what I've selected to show. I've placed the images in a visual narrative so that the work can speak for itself, but of course you know I'm putting my two cents in, too.

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(If you're coming to this post now, you are welcome to use the "Comments" section to share links to or pics of your work. And while we're getting all interactive, take a look at what artist and blogger J.T. Kirkland is proposing: "Artists 'Review' Artists"--a project in which you submit a work of yours for review and in return will have your work reviewed. J.T. has the details here. )
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Gary Petersen, Break-Up, 2007, acrylic on panel, 20x16 inches.

See more at www.garypetersenart.com

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I'm a fan of these two painters, above and below. Gary Petersen combines color and geometry in a way I find particularly appealing: It's hard edge but it doesn't slice you up. He works out of a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. We showed together (along with scores of other artists) at a big, wonderful holiday show called "Punchbowl" at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn--and in fact, the picture above is the one in the show, so you can see it in situ.

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I've yet to meet Eva Lake, below, but we're buddies in the Blogosphere. The ambitious work below is from The Richter Scale, shown recently at Augen Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Visually, it's pretty quaky; you can feel the retinal techtonics.

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Eva Lake, installation of The Richter Scale, with a modular detail, below

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Ken Weathersby, whose work is shown below, is new to me. But perusing his resume, I can see that he shows regularly in New York--and that he's in the 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum on Fifth Avenue, just across from the Met. (Congratulations on that, Ken. I'll be visiting the show soon and will make a point of seeking out your work.) Ken is interested in the inner-and-outer, the back-and-front, the skin and structure of paintings, which puts them in the approaching-sculpture category. Those two rectangles are set flush within the surface of the canvas.

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Ken Weathersby, 149 (GdP, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 14 inches. See more at www.kenweathersby.com

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Bob Barbera, Forward, acrylic on canvas; easel size. See more work on his blog Barbera Grid

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I'm digging the visual connections between and among these works--the crisp geometry, the rectangles, the palette, and the stripes that greate a resonant visual eye-hum. You folks have done a pretty good job of curating your own show here.

Above, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, Yellow on Red, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 34 inches. See more at www.unutterable.org

Below, Donna Sensor Thomas, Autumn (Triangles), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36 inches. See more at www.embryonicthought.com

I love the transition between Thomas's quilt-like pattern and Tracy Helgeson's glowing structure, below, not only for the quilt-barn association, but because the angles, hues and shading have such strong affinities.

Tracy Helgeson, Leaning Gambrel, 2008, oil on birch panel, 30 x 24 inches

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I pulled this image from The Carrie Haddad Gallery website, but you can see more on Tracy's blog, which combines her art life with her family life, smack in rural upstate New York.

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There are two more affinities, below, with painters who are working square with shapes that tend as much toward the biomorphic as the geometric. The Flash construction of Robert Atwell's site, www.robertatwell.com, didn't allow me to pull images, but it it did let me pull the studio image from the homepage. Actually, it's for the better, as you get to see the relationships of many paintings to one another--and to the studio itself, which has its quirky touches of color (note the poles and pipes). I'm not sure where Atwell is from, but Elise Rugolo seems to be from Pittsburg by way of Wisconsin (things one infers from a resume). Her abstraction is a soupcon Fauvist, n'est ce pas?.

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Thanks for sharing, everyone!

Above, Robert Atwell, Studio View

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Below, Elise Rugolo, Thunderhead, 2008, flashe vinyl paint and collage on birch panel, 8 x 8 inches. See more on her website, www.eliserugolo.30art.com

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