Big Tree, Little Branches

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At Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston: Sandra Allen, Ballast, 2009, graphite on paper (15 separate sheets), total of 133.5 x 222.5 inches. That's about 12 x 19 feet

In Boston recently, I stopped into Carroll and Sons Gallery in the South End to see Sandra Allen's marvelous arboreal drawings. The one I loved most was the imposingly large-scale Ballast, installed on the wall facing the gallery entrance. Photographic from a distance, it is a mass of pencil marks from up close--a graphic rewriting of the old saw about not seeing the forest for the, well, you know.

That shift in scale reminded me that in May I'd photographed the maquette of Roxy Paine's Maelstrom at the James Cohan Gallery, just before the actual gargantuan sculpture was installed on the roof of the Met. I'll show you the big work via multiple pictures in the next post, but here you can take in the whole thing in two views.

At James Cohan Gallery in May: Roxy Paine's maquette of Maelstrom

Above: view from the south end (as it is installed on the Met roof)

Below: view from the north

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What I Saw This Summer, Part 2: Exhibitions

This post features exhibitions in Boston and Maine, territory I covered in July.

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BOSTON: At the Kingston Gallery I saw the small, deliciously hued and color-banded paintings of Rose Olson, who has a studio just a few blocks from the gallery. Both studio and gallery are in Boston's South End--the Chelsea of Boston. Click here for a previous post about Olson's work, where I talk about the yin and yang of substantial box-panels tethering those luminous veils of color

Rose Olson: Installation wall of the exhibition Ju Ju Summer 4G at Kingston Gallery, Boston

Below: Ju Ju Summer 4G, 2009, acrylic on birch, 12 x 12 x 3 inches; this image courtest of the gallery website

A few doors down at Carroll and Sons, I saw the drawings of Jacqueline Ott. The gallery houses The Boston Drawing Project, a Pierogi-style setup of flat files in a small back room, which features the work of New England-based artists. Joseph Carroll runs both the gallery and the Project. Ott is a painter who also makes meticulously drafted drawings, based on a triangular grid, using a compass and different hardnesses of graphite pencil. While they're mandala like in shape, they engage the eye actively. Click here to see a four-minute video of the artist talking about and making these drawings.

Jacqueline Ott in The Boston Drawing Project space at Carroll and Sons. Ott's drawings are installed just above the flat file. I don't have good individual pics of the work, but you can get a sense of the visual complexity of her graphite-on-paper geometry by clicking onto the aforementioned video

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MAINE: About 20 miles north of Portland is Brunswick, home of the legendary Icon Gallery. Run by Duane Paluska, Icon is located in a small farmhouse-turned-exhibition-space where two floors are given over to art. Here Kate Beck was having her first solo show, Whitespot: Drawings and Paintings. Beck achieves extraordinary lushness and depth from a repeated graphite line. The upper right corner of her blog features a slideshow of the exhibition, so here I'll just show you a few pics, including one of the artist with her work.

The gallery sign

Kate Beck standing in front of her work--the largest piece, and only painting, in the show

One of Beck's large graphite drawings, with a small, rich detail below

Next "What I Saw" installment: Dannielle Tegeder at Priska Juschka Fine Art; the Postcard show at A.I.R. Gallery