Gallery Shoal Creek will launch the Fall 2010 exhibition schedule with PAPER 2 which opens on September 2, and runs through October 2, 2010. The Exhibition explores the creative process of five artists whose work incorporates printmaking, collages, and sculptural works of hand-made paper. The gallery will host an artists reception on Friday, September 17.

The artists represent a continuum of personal and artistic experiences. Yet, all share a devotion to the medium of paper, a strong foundation in printmaking, and a sense of discovery inherent to the multi-staged creative process each pursues.

Read about the artists and their work.

Melissa Jay Craig
Catherine Dudley
Karen Kunc
Leonard Lehrer
Francesca Samsel

Gallery Shoal Creek welcomes summer with a group show featuring work by four Texas artists who see the world through varied lenses. While perspectives, interpretations, and artistic styles differ, each pivots from a central point that brings together man and nature.

René Alvarado and Marc Burckhardt draw on nature to speak meta- phorically about identity. To a large degree, Alvarado's paintings are self-portraits – an artist's exploration of public persona and private reality – cast in a rich narrative of symbolism, bold layered color, and emotional spontaneity. Adopting old masters' techniques, Burck- hardt creates iconographic imagery that explores modern cultural identity and calls into question our mythic relationship with familiar themes.

Carroll Collier and Tony Saladino respond more directly to nature. A quiet reverence for aesthetic beauty characterizes Collier's formal compositions — an impressionist's view of land and sky, light and shadow rendered with soft edges and subdued, yet pure, color. With gestural brushwork and fluid compositions, Saladino distills that same landscape to abstraction as he addresses the dualities of what he sees — the natural, the man-made and the bridge between the two.

ESTABLISHED PARAMETERS explores the human need to create order from disorder. For Austin artist Shawn Camp, the marked landscape as seen from above becomes a metaphor for this basic human tendency. His paintings distill the idea of landscape to a textured surface of paint that suggest topographic features and delineate boundaries and navigational markings. The thickly applied paint and pasted text reveal an intersection of the raw, natural environment and the ordered grid that man projects upon it

Milt Kobayashi's work is reflective of the significant influence that the arts of Japan had on those working in Paris in the late 19th century. Through artists such as Whistler, Bonnard, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec who embraced Japonism during this period, Kobayashi was drawn to the traditions of Ukiyo-e wood block prints.

Ukiyo-e, "floating world", refers to the young culture that bloomed in cities like Edo, now Tokyo, in the 1700's. The prints depicted this urban lifestyle, scenes from the entertainment districts, beautiful courtesans and popular actors

Milt Kobayashi's subjects, like those of the printmakers, capture the intrigue of urban life. His distinct style also adopts the compositional freedoms introduced by Ukiyo-e masters. Subjects are placed off center, silhouetted and cropped. There is light without shadows, flat areas of strong color, patterned surfaces and contrasting voids. By balancing East and West, Kobayashi has found a way to blend strong design aesthetic with an intimate characterization of his subject.

2009 marks the ten-year anniversary of René Alvarado's association with Gallery Shoal Creek. We have watched as he has matured, explored and allowed his rich narrative language to flow. With a "complex mixture of adopted and personal iconography," his metaphorical imagery remains rooted in his cultural heritage yet embraces the world he has traveled.

In May, the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Texas State Legisla- ture recognized Alvarado as the two-dimensional 2009 Texas State Artist. Standing proudly with his family and friends at the capitol, he reminded us that his "creative process is immersed in a dual identity - my familial roots in northern Mexico and the and by the subtle, mystical environment of my adopted home in West Texas.

The concrete and the abstract intersect in COORDINATES, an exhibition of works on paper by New York-based artist Jill Lear. In the literal realm, trees provide the dialogue for the artist to explore the themes of proportion and space. A portfolio of abstract watercolors and a series of visual haikus lend balance as a less literal response to the environment.

Drawing for me is the joy of investigating and recording an endless possible set of structural and spatial relationships within nature. It is the response to the rhythms as well as the structures within objects and spaces.   JLear

Alexey Krasnovsky's botanical canvases resonate with striking imagery. Simple, sculpted organic forms are floated on rich, warm surfaces suggesting a tapestry detail or the tropical back- ground of a Gauguin painting. The natural elements are present, yet the compositions - a personal response to the warm Texas climate - are born of the imagination. These still life paintings, as the artist calls them, are a departure from the urban street scenes for which he is best known; yet, in both, Krasnovsky's rhythmic patterns and spontaneous use of colour remain constant.

WORDS begins with artist Laurie Frick's large abstract collages where patterns, colors, and words merge to reference memory and recreate the experiences of a normal day. Inspired by Frick's visual spaces, Mary Helen Specht adopts a similar staccato-like rhythm to write a literary triptych in which she, too, expresses fragments of life lived.

I thought about how strawberries are miniature hearts, so sweet, and how they fit in your mouth like a second tongue, staining your teeth...

excerpt from writings of
Mary Helen Specht, 2009

 

Laurie Frick earned a Masters in Fine Art at the New York Studio School and has had solo exhibitions at Robert Steele Gallery's Project Room in New York and at Gallery Shoal Creek. She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2008 and a recent recipient of an Artist Residency at the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. In late 2009, she will complete a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. Her current exhibition will travels to New York in mid May.

Mary Helen Specht has a B.A. in literature from Rice University and an M.F.A. in fiction from Emerson College. After returning from a Fulbright grant to Nigeria, she was named a Dobie Paisano Fellow by the Texas Institute of Letters and the University of Texas Austin. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in numerous journals and literary magazines, and she is currently finishing a Texas-themed short story collection as well as a creative nonfiction book on Nigeria.

A third generation Japanese-American, Milt Kobayashi masterfully melds the elements of oriental line, pattern and composition with spontaneous brushwork as he gives the viewer a glimpse into the intimate, interior scenes reminiscent of an earlier era. His work gracefully blends both eastern and western aesthetic form. Like Degas and Whistler, he studied the ukiyo-e prints. He was drawn to the Japanese masters' use of color harmonies, patterns, negative space and their approach to composition and design. Here Kobayashi found artistic balance.

After graduating from UCLA, Kobayashi worked as an illustrator. In time, he realized that his narrative approach would never meet the constraints of commercial art and turned his attention to fi ne art. He immersed himself in the study of the masters - Sargent, Chase, Duvanek, Vuillard, Velasquez - at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even today, as a highly successful painter, he returns often to spend time with the artists of the 18th and 19th century who have infl uenced his work.

As artists, Aleksander and Lyuba Titovets pay homage to tradition yet maintain a decidedly current point of view. Aleksander's impressionistic landscapes and figurative works reflect his classical Russian training while creating visual energy and emotional warmth much like the personality of the artist himself. Lyuba, the storyteller, takes a playful look at things and relationships in everyday life through her lively still life compositions and folkloric imagery.