Paintings, digital imagery among featured works on exhibit
By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser
We started out last week to review some of the exhibits connected with First Friday, a monthly downtown Honolulu event meant to draw patrons into the city's galleries. This column completes the survey.
Studio 1
Studio 1 Art Gallery, 1 N. King St., has been attracting plenty of media attention.
Some of this attention arises because it is one of the few spots in town that offer performance art and other popular events.
It's also because the mix of visual arts gallery, performing arts space and cocktail lounge at Studio 1 offers a refreshing change of pace from the art world's typical segregation between visual and performance arts venues and the artificial dichotomies of high and pop art.
Abstract paintings by Patricia Carelli (Ebert) are on view in the gallery through August.
Her work clearly is derived from such inspirations as the works of Mark Rothko.
A leading American abstract expressionist, Rothko used the rectangle of large-scale canvases for a one-color ground — visible along the edge and through occasional openings — showing three or four horizontal blocks of color with brushed surfaces and fuzzy borders.
Although exhibiting a rather undeveloped sense of color compared to that of her apparent muse, the work shows promise in her attempts to break away from her formative influences.
Especially in such pieces as "Blue Forest" — which could benefit from a tighter control of the physicality of the paint and a heightened energy of application — she achieves a happier color balance, spontaneity, subtlety and originality than is evident in most of her other works on display.
Atelier 4
Atelier 4 Fine Art Gallery, 841 Bishop St., Suite 155 (its entrance is on the Queen Street side of Davies Pacific Center), is a smallish but stylish gallery featuring the work of painter Brenda Cablayan and painter/printmaker George Woollard through Sept. 3.
Woollard graduated from the University of Hawai'i with a bachelor's degree in painting and a master's in printmaking. He studied on a fellowship at the Atelier 17 in Paris, has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan, and is represented in many public and private collections.
He is well known for his water-soluble monotype, a kind of painterly print.
Multiple layers of color are printed simultaneously in his technique, affording the artist wonderful opportunities for moments of serendipity and freedom of expression, enhanced by passages of pastel and other painterly media and applied gestures.
Over the years, his unique works have consistently grown and developed in richness.
His recent prints are graced with paper-collage elements. A painter and watercolorist as well as a printmaker, Woollard imbues the works with a delicate, mysterious quality that resonates with an almost musical sensibility.
Woollard's colors and shifting forms are at once poetic and dramatic.
In pieces such as "Times Past," his consummate technical skill and philosophical depth are clearly on display.
Brenda Cablayan's acrylic paintings owe much to the work of San Francisco Bay Area painters Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn.
Cablayan's canvases are assured and confident, with a fine sense of form and color that contribute to their pleasant quality and accessibility.
"X18 Olives," one of a series of olive paintings, is delightful even though derivative.
Thiebaud's paintings of food and consumer goods, which first emerged in mature form around 1961, have become such a familiar part of our art-historical landscape that the risks they first posed can easily be taken for granted.
Unlike Thiebaud's rich, smooth dragging of paint across a surface or around a shape in a way that both proclaims the luscious texture of oils and often transforms itself into the material being depicted, Cablayan opts for a somewhat less painterly approach, consistent with her choice of the acrylic medium.
In such pieces as "Merchant and Bethel," "On the Rise," "Houses on the Hill," and "May Day Smokers," however, she artfully applies her derivative sensibility to images that speak to our specific local place and time.
ARTS at Marks Garage
The ARTS at Marks Garage, 1159 Nu'uanu Ave., one of the pioneers responsible for First Friday, features "Digitropolis," an exhibition of digitally generated art by Carolyn W. Clark, Kaethe Kauffman, Saint Wayne and Mark Welschmeyer, through Aug. 30.
Digital imagery explores the creative potential available in computerized technologies and archival inks.
Clark, who originally worked in fiber arts, now works exclusively in digital.
"Kailua Day," a piece in ultrachrome inks on paper, captures the feel of our familiar oceanside community with refreshingly new eyes.
Kauffman works with bodies in motion to create images that invoke altered, meditative states of consciousness.
A subtle background patterned in graceful calligraphy modulates the graphic boldness of her almost monochromatic "Moving Meditation — Knee."
Wayne's technique, rooted in highly technical and mathematical tools, allows him to produce evocative, almost calligraphic images that suggest great depths of feeling.
Welschmeyer's background as a sculptor and in museum display contributes to the vitality of his diorama-like pieces such as "Sea."
The gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, with free admission.
Hawaii Craftsmen — with oversight by the Hawaii Alliance for Arts Education — manages the space, which also features regular performance pieces.
"Haiku Pidgin," a retrospective of the works of the gifted poet and storyteller Jozuf Hadley, aka "bradajo," is on the calendar next weekend. Hawai'i grass-roots poetry with multimedia and music performances will be at The ARTS at Marks Aug. 22-23 at 7 p.m. and Aug. 24 at 3 p.m.
Ramsay Gallery
Although hardly expressive of a cutting-edge sensibility, the work on view at the Ramsay Gallery Museum, 1128 Smith St., offers an attractive display of a consummate technician's craft as an alternative to the angst and clutter of some contemporary art.
With works dating to 1951 on exhibit, Ramsay highlights her considerable talent with detailed pen and ink renderings in such lovely expressions as "War and Peace," a design for the Natatorium War Memorial.
The gallery is itself worth a visit, since it is an impressive art-loft demonstration project to encourage adaptive reuse of spaces in the heart of historic Honolulu.
Got Art
Open just since June, Got Art, a shop and gallery at 1136 Nu'uanu, hosts "Got Balls," a group show featuring David Behlke, Eric Kaneshiro, owner and artist Debbie Mitchell, Bernie Moriaz and Roy Venters.
Moriaz's "Zulu Mamas" and Mitchell's "Voodoo Box" nicely accentuate an eclectic show that has fun with double entendre and is only slightly naughty.
Hopper and Ventners
The final stops on the walking tour bring us to the next-door neighbors, the Pegge Hopper Gallery at 1164 Nu'uanu and The Studio of the redoubtable Roy Venters at 1160 Nu'uanu.
Hopper's gallery has graced Chinatown since 1983.
Her well-known trademark imagery in acrylics on canvas features Hawaiian earth-mother figures executed with assured graphic and color control.
Also on display is her more recent, somewhat freer, less-controlled style applied to the delightful lady motorcycle riders in "Flying Tita" and "One Kine Harley."
Complementing her canvases are the consummate craft and wit of Venters' glass hearts, all of which sold out shortly after the opening.
Coming up Aug. 30 at the Hopper Gallery is the second annual "Afternoon of Art," a catered fund-raiser for Healthy Mothers Health Babies Coalition of Hawai'i and featuring the works of more than 40 of Hawai'i's finest artists. (Tickets: $40 individual, $65 couple.)
For reservations, call 951-5805 or write wendyp@hmhb-hawaii.org.
Tucked away in the back of the Hopper Gallery and in the maze that is Venters' studio are Kandi Everett's delightful and extremely affordable drawings, at once provocative paeans to the female form and mischievous incitements to chill out and relax.
Venters' studio also offers a variety of his unique and whimsical work, including his recent glass hearts, one-of-a-kind decorated and painted furniture, and other pieces that defy traditional categorization.
Editor's note: Advertiser art critic Victoria Gail-White returns from vacation next week. Guest writer David C. Farmer wrote the Sunday art column from 1975 to 1976. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's degree in Asian and Pacific art history.
