Hung jury

Brush residents artists wait for viewer dissection

by Leon Nigrosh

MIXED MEDIA '98 At the Brush Art Gallery, 256 Market Street, Lowell, through September 6.

Usually the Brush Gallery resident artists can be found working in their adjoining studios, which are always open to the public. Once a year they wipe down and vacuum everything, take over the front gallery, and display their latest efforts. This year's works, produced by the very eclectic group of 12 artists in almost as many media, contain some refreshing results.

Signe Kaleel's Confirmation Present is a vibrant depiction of the Crucifixion. Made from hand-quilted fabric patches, this work is framed with varicolored squares that allude to the 14 Stations of the Cross. The entire panel is surrounded by black fabric triangles, representing the Crown of Thorns. Kaleel, a mother with teenagers, knows how important the role of religion can be for some young people. Her cloth panel can easily been thought of as a modern-day icon.

Kaleel also offers a less-weighty series of small quilted panels called Orange. The same size as the wooden boxes that clementines (part orange, part tangerine) come in, these rectangles are truly crazy quilts of various orange-hued fabrics, stitched together in intricate patterns, each with a strategically placed small orange circle.

Eileen O'Keefe Byrne likes to photograph things close-up. This self-proclaimed "computer weenie" uses her camera work to escape from her boring daily corporate number-crunching. By looking at only a portion of a particular object, Byrne literally forces the viewer to re-examine the image as a whole. Her picture of a monitor lizard's eye, Godzilla, gives so little indication of scale (other than the lizard's skin) that the work becomes near abstract, concentrating on pattern, line, and tone, rather than presenting a realistic image.

Byrne's charming mirror view of a Zebra Shell gives her spiral striped subject a monumental quality not usually ascribed to this minuscule denizen of the sea. Byrne uses no darkroom tricks or fancy lenses to take us into her personal Lilliput.

Painter Tom Gill brings a different perspective to his work -- literally. He lost his left eye to cancer when he was 10 and has viewed the world with only one eye ever since. His work is a very comfortable admixture of Impressionism and Realism. We can look at a painting and readily know what it is, but it isn't really what we think. Cook Out is obviously a genial family gathering, yet like Byrne's photos, when you get closer, the painting becomes an abstract arrangement of varicolored brushstrokes. This same effect can be seen in Good Harbor Beach, nominally a Gloucester beach scene, but an amazing array of brush marks that merely suggest swimmers and sun worshipers.

Gill's admiration for the work by painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is readily apparent in Repose, a portrait of his aunt made with dancing brushstrokes similar to those in Sargent's 1911 watercolor Simplon Pass: The Lesson, which shows several young women enjoying the afternoon sun.

Deirdre Grunwald goes all the way to abstract with her mixed-media paintings. Dragon is a large canvas awash with bright splashes of color and areas thick with scumbled paint, but there is nary a reptile to be seen. Look hard enough, however, and you might find a coffee cup and maybe a guitar.

Grunwald says that her paintings are based on her dreams but that the finished works bear little resemblance to the original idea. Walls II came about from her thoughts of ancient cities and from her musings on their graffiti-filled walls. Her walls are coated with stylized patterns heavily influenced by Celtic designs, interspersed among apparent entrances and suggested sculptures with indistinct features. It is the perceived doorways that prompted local poet Eleni Zohdi to write about what might be occurring behind the openings.

For many of these artists it is just this interplay between themselves and their viewers that keeps them going. Gill says that he needs the feedback from visitors to "feed the fire," and Grunwald says that it is important to connect with the public. "People are often surprised to see an artist actually making things. They just never think about how a work of art gets done." Don't miss this opportunity to see a selection of notable artworks, then make your way down the corridor to meet the artists who made them.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call (978) 459-7819.