Get Real

Pioneer Valley painters on view at the Danforth

by Leon Nigrosh

THE VALLEY REALISTS At the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Avenue, Framingham, through February 14.

Only 10 works make up this small, but potent exhibition currently on display at the Danforth Museum. These works are remarkable not only for the depth and breadth of talent they encompass but the varied subject matter, the dazzling array of colors, and the sharply focused intensity. Although the images reflect the individuality of each artist, an overall cohesiveness can be felt immediately upon entering the gallery. Perhaps there is something magical about the atmosphere in the Pioneer Valley, because these five artists were separately drawn to Western Massachusetts from places as far away as Los Angeles and Michigan. Together they formed a tightly knit group and proceeded to discover their individual creativity and watch it blossom.

The show is dedicated to one of the artists, Frances Cohen Gillespie, who died in early October. Almost to the end of her career, she created large scale portrait and flower canvases. Not satisfied to render a likeness, Gillespie often incorporated mirrors into her compositions, and usually with a twist. Her life-size Portrait of Kathy shows an African-American woman wearing an electric blue smock and a traditionally patterned African shawl in hot red, orange, and green. As Kathy leans against the wall, her reflection appears in an oval mirror. But rather than a simple reversed image, we see her reading a history of Africans in America. An intricately patterned enamel vase filled with bright yellow Black-eyed Susan complete this engaging image.

This fascination with flowers is magnified in her 1993 painting Purple Cattleya Orchids. Painted on a wooden panel, every vein and pore is intimately revealed in both the flowers that seem about to reach out of the canvas, and those hovering in the mirrored background.

Gillespie appears as the subject in Jane Lund's nearly life-size pastel Portrait of Frances. With its needle-like concentration on details, this spectacular work is obviously a labor of love -- right down to the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck and the Calvin Klein button fastening Gillespie's wrinkled jeans.

Randall Deihl continues to offer us his skewed takes on our culture with his Landscape with Pink Flamingos, in which two plastic birds take center stage on a lawn so lush with grass you could count every blade. His Self-Portrait Without the Artist is another tongue-in-cheek look at the art world. Even though Deihl is pictorially absent from his canvas, his exquisitely rendered leather jacket, squashed paint tubes, duct-taped chair, and array of knick-knacks offer us insight into his complex, yet insightful personality.

Scott Prior is represented by his oil on canvas Ball at Sunset, in which a child's purple/pink ball takes on increased proportion and importance in a vegetable garden. Prior also is showing his very well-known and popular Nanny and Rose -- the screened porch portrait of Nanny Vonnegut (Kurt's daughter) and her dog Rose. And here is the glitch in this exhibit, or in this case the Gicleé. On closer inspection we discover that this framed work is not the richly painted original canvas that Prior produced in 1983 but a digitally reproduced ink-jet copy masquerading under a fancy name. And on that wall is Gregory Gillespie's masterfully organized Still Life with Eggplant, with its tightly rendered Delft tiles, sharing space with Lund's impressive White Still Life -- both also full-sized ink-jet reproductions of important paintings. What further complicates the situation is that these mechanically reproduced images have been signed by the artists, as if they had actually had a hand in producing the works, instead of some faceless corporate manufacturer. The company's explanation is that this technique can put the images "into the hands of more people." While this concept is all well and good, and on a commercial level to be commended, a poster is still a poster and should be so recognized -- and displayed in the appropriate venue.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call: 620-0050.