CUSTOM HOUSE WHARF: by John Whalley, graphite on paper |
Greenhut Galleries’ third biennial “Portland Show” coincides with the gallery’s 25th anniversary. Before you cringe at the thought of a group show with the city as its subject, bear in mind that it is November and the lighthouse-ogling visitors have long since fled. “The Portland Show” is an inside job that invites each and every Portland dweller to caucus in celebration and reflection of the place in which we choose to live.
Anyone with two legs and a penchant for exploration has surely arrived at the Custom House Wharf behind the Harbor Fish Market. Some locals even mystically refer to it as “the center of the universe,” so it is no surprise that the scene would attract the painter’s eye. Tina Ingraham paints Harbor Fish Market, Low Tide as a meditation on sunlight. The patchwork boards and textures of the building and the ripples of the water meeting the dock serve as reflecting shapes to bring foreword the unseen setting sun as true subject of the painting.
In contrast, Jon Imber sees Portland Pier as a vehicle to portray modulations of energy and vitality. A dockworker busies himself while surrounded by crashing waves and colorfully charged building structure. Rather than frame the serenity of a sunset, Imber shows us the totality of chaos and disintegration through coarse, bold brushwork, paint splatters, and violent scrapes into the paint.
The same building is interpreted so precisely by John Whalley that his graphite portrayal makes the objectivity a statement unto itself. The near-photographic realism is astonishing in the artist’s technique but is divested of an emotional quality infused in the other portrayals. One place with so many interpretations may give new credence to the hackneyed theory that the Custom House Wharf is indeed the center of the universe, the center being wherever you are in mind and body.
David Wolfe handles photographic reality with creative decorum through his printing process for Checkmate. A palladium print of a man, clearly upset about his chess game in a shop window, conveys a warm, murky quality. To add to the dreamlike vision, the scene is devoid of any distinguishing signs or landmarks. This is a universal view of the shelters in which we place ourselves to strategize, celebrate, or lament our progress in our micro and macrocosmic games.
Michael Waterman illuminates the intuitive and unobservable planes of reality intersecting with the visible cityscape. With dreaming bristles in his brush, Waterman creates cloudy interpretations that depict an urban reality with the veil of perception partially drawn. In On Horseback, two figures ride a horse that straddles the diminutive city of Portland. Collective consciousness or dream reality is made manifest while the city sleeps.
A surreal quality inhabits the work of Susan Barnes as well. Photographs of the waterfront with its already otherworldly cranes and distant oil tanks are cut and reassembled in collage intermixed with grand sweeps of painted color. Track 1 results in a cohesive whole of broken perception with the composition leading the eye from the train tracks at the edge of the painting to the abyss in the center of the harbor.
