Arresting Style ... New Show is Fresh, Challenging, Sometimes Humorous
The colorful works stand or hang on the white walls of the 5,000-square-foot gallery perhaps best known for its large contemporary sculptures. Although this show is somewhat different from earlier ones, the selections of owner Peg Goldberg Longstreth, who is also a freelance music critic for the Daily News, are unmistakable. If you know Longstreth's taste, based on her many years of running a gallery here and in Indiana, you could identify it no matter where it might be. It is that distinctive. Besides the monumental sculptures the brightly colored paintings come in many arresting styles: abstract, geometric, neo-surreal and realistic, to name a few. The overall mood is serious, fresh, challenging and sometimes humorous. Humor is often rare in art galleries, but Longstreth knows what she likes and has plenty of clients who purchase her choices. Giving the gallery its recognizable continuity are the powerful ceramic lava-glazed figural sculptures of Mark Chatterley, of Williamston, Mich., whom the gallery has represented for 10 years. The sculptor shows in 12 galleries around the country. Chatterley, 46, takes it as a compliment when I say his tall dark bald men resemble golems, giants in Hebrew lore meant to do various deeds. Being often life-size or larger, they have a strong presence. Their charcoal and blue-purple colors sometimes have the force of a weathered Rodin bronze. "That's good," Chatterley said. "I love Rodin. But my figures are meant to be happy. I hope people think so." But they can be seen as disturbing. "If you can think about them the next day, I'm doing my job." The sculptor has been making figures for 20 years. He constructs them without internal support at a rate of 6 to 8 inches a day. "I don't overwork the clay, which is my own formula, and the pieces dry by degrees. I use 16,000 pounds of clay a year. I build pieces up from the base and work on several at the same time." He also has his own glaze formula and applies silicon carbide to increase the sculptures' holes and fissures. His large propane-heated kiln takes three weeks to fill and fires at 2,100 degrees, 100 degrees lower than porcelain. Chatterley, who isn't bald, models his figures that way so changing styles won't age them. His "Purple Seer" is an apt portrayal for an art critic: the mummy-like standing figure is impressed all over with sculptured eyes. Chatterley has talent and has perfected his technique as well as putting his figures through a wide range of activities, from standing on each other's backs to diving in mid-air. Naples, he said, has been good for him. Earlier in the day he had installed a work 30 feet overhead for a local collector, with Longstreth lending support. Another sculptor, Lyn Emery, creates abstract work in aluminum. "Dryad II" is a 16-foot-tall polished and partly red-enameled propeller form sinuously shaped and upright. Crowning it asymmetrically are fins that move slowly in the wind. One can think of possible influences on Emery from American sculptors George Rickey and Alexander Calder. But "Dryad II" also can recall Bernini's baroque marble of Apollo chasing a dryad, or wood nymph, that escapes him by changing into a willow. Emery's work is finely made but has an unfortunate welding jointure at the base. A contemporary acrylic painting, "Diana," by Diane Haden, portrays semi-abstractly this mythic goddess of the hunt. One is left to wonder about the psychic connection between the goddess' name and the artist's. There is no such doubt about Naples artist Funsun Gulem, originally from Turkey. In her grisaille painting (dark gray and white), she painted her reflection as though she were inside a store window. Her technique shows astonishing virtuosity. Artists Daniel Meyer and George Snyder are multi-talented, working both alone and together. Meyer has coordinated two aluminum sculptures — one a tall obelisk, the other a cube, both suggesting tidal pools — by building surfaces with modeled casts of seashells and Walt Disney character takeoffs. The sides were done on a flat surface and assembled as hollow forms. Meyer also has a brilliant acrylic blue-green painting, "Tide Pool," that minutely pictures a beach's pebbles, shells and, in this case, amusing detritus. Meyer and Snyder collaborated on a series of rainbow-hued post-pop sculptures in a light vein, which is also seen in Snyder's wife Jennifer Snyder's kooky but well-made women's pocketbooks. She builds them from wood frames in triangular and rectangular forms and then carefully decorates.
Also exceptional are the superbly done paintings of Bruce Campbell. Besides "Bermuda Triangles" of a purple cabbage and artichoke, he includes "Poultry No. 15," a mixed media tour de force of Leghorn chickens with all their accouterments: a dozen eggs in a tray, one egg behind bars, two lighted electric bulbs suggesting an incubator plus Campbell's handwritten comments. This would be a showstopper in a museum or home.
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Mark Chatterly, "Purple Seer," crater glazed ceramic.
