mlcarpenter - about artist

Asheville Citizen-Times - 2002
Blue Spiral 1: Abstraction. A parallel reality.

"ABSTRACTION, A PARALLEL REALITY":
Abstract artists' stunning show enflames the imagination

This season's abstraction show at the Blue Spiral 1 is notable from the first for some distinguished sculpture.

Sally Rogers' "Delacroix's Hat," is a big engine exploded-fanciful and industrial, with an immense sense of groundedness, of monumentality.

Brent Skidmore's construction, "Drawing," is a huge, cliff-grown orchid, its stalk shooting from a jumbled ant's nest with delicacy and monstrosity in a single gesture. John Ransmeier's wall pieces are like enormous rough opals just lifted from the ground, masterpieces of the organic-or should I say of the mineral-the most immediately striking object in the show.

Isn't it fun to make up word parallels for objects whose existence is wholly visual? I wonder if the average art patron would know the pieces about which I'm writing by the words I've used to describe them. But I understand things by telling stories about them, and the work now at the Blue Spiral allows the viewer's imagination to follow the trail of the artist's imagination in a way unusually free of the markers of definable image or "content."

What fun, what an occasion for boldness on the part of both creator and audience.

In painting, Andrew Moore's large acrylic "Nothing Between," is part joke and part paradox, as everything happens "in between," in the shaft of vibrant white shooting between borders of pale Prussian blue like a water-spout of a dim, rose-colored sea. I admire from afar the gigantic rooms the people must have who are able to hang such forceful paintings.

Betty Clark's evocative titles, "Sojourn," "Corridors of Memory," "Perfect Illusion," introduce paintings of subtlety and intellectual force. I am on record as thinking Clark is the best abstract painter known to me in Asheville.

The work is austere without being minimal, suggestive wholly without coercion. The forms are a little more pronounced than in the past, and the pinkish palette I first knew is refining into white. I wish the paintings were more localized in the show, more gathered together by artist, a tactic which would, in Clark's case, and in Barbara Fisher's, allow more sense of gathering individual force than the present hanging.

Fisher's new works further the shift in balance between abstraction and collage, while Paul Tamanian continues his leap out of three into two dimensions, from the tabletop onto the wall, with a collection of striking wall pieces still in his evolved and recognizable style.

Both of these artists delight the eye and the imagination with their exploratory impulse and their clear willingness to rise up out of former selves.

M.L. Carpenter provides a storm of multi-colored light, at once turbulent and inviting. Carpenter's lavish pieces even dare one of the anathemas of abstraction, an illusion of depth. I don't care-do you? It would take a bold room to sustain these bird-of-paradise paintings, but those with such rooms might take a good look, as Carpenter seems to me an artist with an achieved present and a promising future.

One might compare Carpenter's paintings with Eva Carter's for a short lesson in the difference between inspiration and productivity. Beside Carpenter's-or Clark's-work, Carter's comes off like a student study in values and complementary shading, mechanical, with a calculated professionalism which has, for me, an effect opposite from the one most likely intended.

John Lloyd Jones is May's Featured Artist in the upstairs gallery. Jones's paintings have always possessed a meticulous precision, a life-sized world shrunk down to the size of a canvas. Geometric and metaphysical at once, works such as "Taurus" and "Emerging #4" fit the niche occupied by icons in another context.

They are objects of contemplation themselves, and lead the mind to the contemplation of worlds onto which they are vivid windows. The paintings are lit by twilight or the mysterious radiance of deep night, and, to me, altogether beautiful. Jones's experiments with larger pieces do not seem to be paying off just yet.

Why should they? Icons are small, and their power is the power of concentration.

David Hopes writes about the arts for the Citizen-Times. He is professor of literature and language at UNC Asheville.

"ABSTRACTION, A PARALLEL REALITY": Abstract works by M.L. Carpenter, Eva Carter, Betty Clark, Jamie Davis, Barbara Fisher, Robert Gardner, David M. Goldhagen, John Glumpler, Robyn Horn, Greg McPherson, Judy V. Jones, Andrew Moore, John Ransmeier, Sally Rogers, Brent Skidmore, Paul Tamanian, Scott Upton and Joana G. Wardel, through June 22, Blue Spiral 1, 38 Biltmore Ave., Asheville. Call 251-0202.