March 2009 Wrap-up: David Farmer and Marianna McDonald

If you stepped into the Community Arts Center last month (March 2009) you found yourself surrounded by trees.  Well… paintings of trees.  David Farmer, Artist in Residence at the CAC, has assembled sixteen paintings of one of his favorite subjects in his month long exhibit, “Trees.”

 

 

 

Trees are a surprisingly hot topic around Danville, Kentucky at the present time.  In the month prior to Farmer’s exhibition, a winter storm whipped through the region, covering every outside surface in about a half inch of ice, downing electricity lines, and cutting off power to nearly every home.  Trees were groaning under the excess pressure from the weight of the ice and loud snaps of falling limbs were about the only sounds to be heard.  Weeks later, even as we were installing the exhibit, piles of twigs and limbs littered the sidewalks like walls, waiting to be collected by contract workers.  The area definitely looks much different today as a result of the damage with an otherwise beautiful landscape punctuated by trees that look more like a fistful of broken matchsticks.  The damage was so severe, that David told me in the days ahead of the exhibit, “Maybe I should’ve painted something different.  Trees don’t seem too popular these days.”

 

The strength of Farmer’s exhibit lies in the similarities between the canvases.  All but six of the paintings on display exhibit almost the same compositional features.  The images feature a cropped image of a forest tree line, where the viewer doesn’t quite see the bottom of the trees, nor the top, but rather the trunk and foliage of the subject.  When looking around the Community Arts Center’s Grand Hall, you almost get the sensation that you are surrounded in a forest, with each painting creating an illusionary window to the outside.  The vertical rhythms created by the white limbs of sycamore and birch trees provide a stark contrast to the bright colors of spring and autumn leaves.  These paintings, although painted in a representational style, reflect a very abstract approach to their construction.  White and black lines represent the trunks of trees while their leaves are painted with a dappling of thick, colorful brushstrokes, creating a very textural effect to the leaves in the foreground.  I find trees to be one of the more difficult subjects to paint in that there is a certain organic abstraction in their form.  If the artist goes too simple, it looks like a cartoon, too complex and it looks contrived and man-made.  Farmer finds the delicate balance between these two extremes and creates a painterly, yet realistic approach.

 

In the Farmers National Bank Gallery upstairs at the Community Arts Center, the works of Marianna McDonald were on display.  Her exhibit, “Landscapes in Pastel,” featured very distinguished pastel works on paper.  In my opinion, one of the greatest things that McDonald does is to create a magnificent landscape out of a scene that depicts very little in terms of subject matter or focal points.  An open field of grass becomes so rich, bathed in the purple and pink shades of early evening that it needs little else to propel it into the realm of fine art.  Although McDonald creates scenes predominantly featuring Kentucky and West Virginia, there is an almost universal feel to her landscapes.  One gets the feeling that they could be almost anywhere in the world – anywhere but the busy cityscape, that is.  She often flirts with variations in size and dimension.  There were several large works on display, but also some very small – in the neighborhood of four inches square.  Each, regardless of size depicts the scenery in the warmest tones imaginable.  The works remind me of the very end of summer, where the skies finally clear into that deep blue and that magical light just before dusk – the kind photographers seek to bottle up – seeps in just before an amber sunset.