Mary McCoy

Meeting Rebecca Hoffberger by Mary McCoy

March 17, 2020 by Mary McCoy

Imagine the thrill for an artist like me when the director of a major museum made a point of congratulating me on one of my sculptures. I can still see her back then in 2011, a small, sparkly woman with long blond hair and an oversized glittering necklace looking up at the shiny, tattered, slightly muddy, beribboned string of stray balloons I had draped back and forth across the corner of the gallery. That was how I first met Rebecca Hoffberger, of the American Visionary Art Museum.

The truth was, however, that meeting her at a reception for an art show at Howard County Center for the Arts wasn’t exactly going to advance my career. Her museum exhibits the work of people who, unlike me, haven’t been to art school and don’t show their work in galleries. Instead, they make art because of a burning need in their spirit.

On February 21, the Spy partnered with the Academy Art Museum to present a talk by Hoffberger. In this overview of the AVAM’s history and mission, she made it clear that she feels there’s more to art than what we normally see in white-walled galleries and urged us to think less about the finished product and more about art as an open-ended, no-holds-barred investigation and celebration of what our world is all about. You can find out more in these two articles here and here on the Spy, but what I want to do here is tell you more about Hoffberger herself.

She’s a visionary. There are plenty of articles online that will tell you about her colorful life and how her response to the paintings and drawings of institutionalized psychiatric patients sparked her ideas for the museum. Deeply moved by the passion behind their raw creativity, she felt a compulsion to establish a venue where art born of an intuitive need for creative expression could be seen and considered. Recognizing art as a basic human need, the AVAM has dedicated itself to art that follows “the intuitive path of learning to listen to the small, soft voice within.”

I’m an art critic, as well as an artist, and in spending many years looking at art and talking with artists, I’ve been continually reminded that almost all artists do begin by listening to that “small, soft voice,” but too often, we’re pulled off track. In our culture, to earn your stripes as a “real” artist, you pretty much have to attend art school and be indoctrinated in (mostly Western) art history, then build a substantial resume of gallery exhibits, grants, awards and residencies, and remember to use words like “ontology,” “visceral” and “deconstruction” whenever possible. These expectations have made contemporary art into an insular, privileged activity. There’s too much background knowledge required for most people to appreciate gallery art, much less enjoy it.

Hoffberger doesn’t bother with that kind of stuff. She keeps a very active eye out for people who just plain need to make art, whether they call it art or not, and this is what sets the AVAM apart from most art museums. For example, my friend, Trams Hollingsworth, who is a gardener and rescuer of eagles, raccoons and crows, is a featured artist in the AVAM’s current exhibit, “The Secret Life of Earth: Alive! Awake! (and Possibly Really Angry!). When I asked her how Hoffberger knew about the pigeon skeleton she lent for the exhibit, she said she had made it her business to befriend Hoffberger after a trip to the AVAM bowled her over.

“I stalked her,” she explained. “I started writing these love notes, like ‘You taught me so much in one day and I can’t teach you anything except how to do nothing and I’m pretty sure you’re not very good at that.’ Then we started corresponding and then maybe five years ago there was this really big snow storm. I got a call and she said, ‘This is Rebecca and I’m really tired and I want to take your Master’s course in doing nothing. I’m gonna get snowed in with you.’ And she did—five days snowed in.”

Rebecca Hoffberger has that effect on people. She makes you look at things differently, and like any good teacher, she is not aloof and never hesitates to ask whatever she likes. So at a small party at Trams’s house the evening before Hoffberger’s talk, when she overheard me say something to Trams about the aftereffects of having had brain surgery, she broke off her own conversation to ask, from across the room, how the experience had changed me. A brief conversation and a few days later, I found myself having lunch with Pat Bernstein, who had also undergone brain surgery. We had a fascinating talk comparing notes about how my experience had led me to lose my fear of spiders, heightened my appreciation of being alive, and made me hate sugary food, while hers had caused her to suddenly start seeing faces in trees and rocks. Impelled to document them, she had gone to Hoffberger for suggestions on how to share the resulting series of photographs with the public and ended up with her photos included in the AVAM’s “Earth” show.

Hoffberger’s talk at the Academy Art Museum was titled “Welcome to Wonder,” as apt a description of her outlook as of the AVAM’s infectious celebration of awe, outrageousness, pathos, obsession, and joy. Quick of mind and full of enthusiasm, she’s also full of stories. Spurred by her warmth and openness, I overcame my shyness and invited her to visit our studio the next day on her way back to Baltimore. It was a quick visit, but before it was over, she had shared anecdotes about the children’s train at the Wanamaker store in Philadelphia, Ronald Reagan’s psychic, Ohio’s Serpent Mound, how corn developed from a grass-like plant bearing a row of tiny pyramid-shaped kernels, and how pawlonia trees absorb eleven times more carbon dioxide than other trees.

We did a thorough tour of the studio as we talked, but we didn’t look at the sculpture she liked back in 2011. It’s currently stuffed into a big bag, but it has doubled in length since Hoffberger saw it. I feel kind of like one of her visionary artists who are impelled to make art because I can’t help but continue working on it. It irks me that I’m forever finding wayward balloons caught in the stubble in the fields of my family’s farm and tangled in the marsh grass along the river, so I tidy them up, carry them back to the studio, and incorporate them into what is now a nearly 50-foot-long sculpture. I’ve exhibited it four times so far and hope to do so again because, as Hoffberger and her museum have reminded me, we need to follow that urge to make art.

My personal soapbox is for the environment, but as a trip to the AVAM will bear out, there are myriad ways that art can help us examine the realities of life. More than simply a means of celebrating beauty and creative skills, art is a process through which we can explore, clarify and inspire a sense of value in shared social and spiritual significances. In our age of fractured relationships, confused priorities, hate-mongering, population pressure, and environmental degradation, we need plenty of art. We need to do what Hoffberger and the AVAM advocate and tune our senses so that the “small, soft voice” can be heard.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

Review: “Intimate Generations” at the Kohl By Mary McCoy

February 10, 2020 by Mary McCoy

True to its title, “Intimate Generations,” is achingly intimate, personal and moving. Curated by Tara Gladden, the Kohl Gallery’s new Director and Curator, and on view at the Kohl through February 29, this exhibit kindles a multitude of emotions, deep memories and realizations about how family influences and profoundly affects our personal identity and view of life, yet it also ranges far beyond personal stories into the hidden bonds that connect us all.

Kalen Na’il Roach, “My Mother, My Father and I”

There’s a wonderful fusion of generations in “My Mother, My Father and I” by Prince George’s County artist Kalen Na’il Roach. Spliced from old family photos, parents and child are merged into one warm brown and black form with the child (the artist as a toddler) snug in the center. In another reworked photo, radiating lines scratched into the surface of a snapshot of his mother intensify the lively energy in her smile, while patches of color swiped on with paint markers make the space around his father hum as he poses for the camera. Shot in the family’s home, these are casual images, comfortable and brimming with familiarity, yet Roach’s abrupt cropping and slashing gestures indicate that there’s more. These photos can’t tell the whole story—there are mysteries present. Certainly, family is the bedrock of existence, yet it is full of unknowns, things about our closest relatives that we may never know or understand.

The bonds of parent and child are explored on an even more intimate level in Philadelphia artist Aimee Gilmore’s “Sleep Series” and “Milkscapes.” Using her own breast milk, she poured luxurious, stunningly intricate forms onto paper or photos. They call to mind primordial patterns of creation, whether swirling galaxies, surging lava flows or meandering streams and rivers. While some are digital prints capturing the spectacular details of these spills of the nutritious milk, in others, actual breast milk spreads across the surface of a shadowy images where infant and mother slumber in a milky dream, the physicality of their bond underscored by the puckering of the paper under the flowing liquid.

Khánk H. Lê, “His Brave New World”

One of the strengths of this show is that it views family relationships from many angles. While Roach and Gilmore explore the closeness and trust between parents and children, chanan delivuk, of Baltimore, documents the inevitable truth that love begets pain. While still in her teens, delivuk was startled by her own lack of understanding of her mother’s emotional and mental state when she read the journal her mother wrote to cope with her deep sadness, uncertainties and vulnerability. Touched by her grandmother’s suffering and decline, the loss of her father, and her own guilt over inadequacies as a parent, delivuk’s mother had been internalizing her pain. Pages of the journal are reproduced for this show, interspersed with ghostly medical imaging of her mother’s heart from a hospital stay for surgery. Strikingly reminiscent of Gilmore’s milk spills, these images are haunting proof that while technology allows us to actually see the heart, it can’t tell us what that heart is feeling. It’s a shrewd metaphor that seconds Roach’s intimation of the impossibility of knowing the full truth about our families.

Every family habitually conceals its secret pain by developing unspoken rules. For Roxana Alger Geffen, a Washington artist with WASP roots, objects found in her family’s attic and her grandmother’s junk drawer were the starting point for “The Binding Ties.” Employing these materials in unexpected combinations, she created a comical but telling series of sculptures that explore personal identity within the tacit expectations of the family. Illustrating the proper interests of a perfect father figure, “The Robe of Rote Masculinity” resembles an elegant dressing gown, but it is stitched from fabric printed with images of a golfer practicing his swing and its hem is weighted with a row of old wrenches. The robe’s well-tempered mate shows up in “The Genteel Role of Feminine Blindness,” featuring a life-size, immaculately white figure with tassels dangling where its eyes should be above a dress fashioned from embroidered dish towels and trimmed with hundreds of the annoying plastic tabs used to attach price tags. One can easily imagine polite conversations at the dinner table where no one would dare to rock the boat, let alone reveal personal passions or gnawing woes.

A common theme throughout this show is that from photos to attic clutter, every object has strings of meaning attached. Whether these are joyful, nourishing or painful, they are almost always poignant in their fragmentary nature. By rifling through his family’s old photos and documents, Aaron Wax, of Brooklyn, was able to create a halting reconstruction of his grandfather’s arrival in America, including a passport-like photo of his grandfather, stamped with official-looking seals, that shows him neatly dressed in a suit and tie with an anxious, faraway look in his youthful eyes. A Polish Jew who tragically lost his first family in World War II, his identity has been reduced to a few teasing artifacts that sketch his story but tell little of the man himself. Wax never knew his grandfather, but as he notes in some explanatory text on the wall, “If not for his great loss I would not be alive.” In this thought, he acknowledges that family not only shapes identity, but is, on the most basic level, the material reason for one’s existence.

Immigration is a vexed topic these days with effects that resound down through the generations. For Washington artist Khánk H. Lê, whose family brought him to America from Vietnam when he was a small child, immigration and its consequences are immediate and ever-present. Encrusted with patterns of rhinestones and glitter, his images are as instantly alluring as a display in a candy store yet so unremittingly busy that they are almost hard to look at. Like Roach, Lê began with family photos that offer glimpses of tenderness and mutual support. Reproducing them as stark, high-contrast paintings, he spotlights each family member or group by positioning them in an alien world of flat, shimmering patterning. Contrasted with these chilly stand-ins for the jazzy, jittery hyperactivity of contemporary American culture, their humanity and vulnerability take center stage.

There is arguably no stronger influence on personal identity than the family, whatever its history. Whether considering the stories evoked by this exhibit or tracing our own family’s examples, we find threads that lead in countless directions. However much we can discern the connections they make, there are multitudes more lost to memory and time that nonetheless exert profound effects on our character and understanding. These are the mysteries that shape us as individuals, as families and as a culture. Look deeply enough and we find the whole world is our influence.

Spy Review: Lee D’Zmura & Anna Harding by Mary McCoy

December 16, 2019 by Mary McCoy

There’s a surprisingly intimate and uplifting show at the Talbot County Public Library. On view through January 29. the botanical art of Lee B. D’Zmura and Anna G. Harding unfolds with portrait after portrait of native plants, garden flowers, fungi, butterflies, bees, and an array of fruits and vegetables.

Entitled “An Art for All Seasons,” this extensive show includes meticulous colored pencil drawings and watercolors so colorful, detailed and deliciously lush that you can get lost in each and every one. From its explosions of intricately striped red and white petals to its papery dried sepals, D’Zmura’s “Amaryllis” is a jaw dropper, while across the room, Harding presents a quintessentially elegant depiction of our native trumpet vine, complete with vivid orange tubular blossoms and graceful, deep green leaves nibbled here and there by insects.

Lee B. D’Zmura, “Tomatillos,” watercolor

The two artists have included some short bits of text that reveal the thoughts behind their approach. One, a quote from Georgia O’Keefe, says “No one sees a flower really; it’s so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.”

D’Zmura and Harding approach their plants with considerable fondness and often with humor. Historically, botanical art is a method of plant identification and classification that requires a knowledge of botany, disciplined pencil and watercolor techniques, sharp eyes, and a steady hand. But although both artists are skilled in this painstaking process, they go beyond the simply informational or decorative to explore changing seasons, invading insects, decay and new growth—in short, they tell not only about the visual characteristics of these plants, they hone in on the lives and character of their subjects.

Anna G. Harding, “Golden Bunch Gall,” graphite

D’Zmura’s “Golden Beet,” bristling with hairy rootlets and multiple sturdy stems is comically stoic, and her “Tomatillos” seem to be engaged in an animated conversation. And in the epitome of optimism, two fragile new leaves sprout directly from a half-healed wound amid labyrinthine patterns of bark in her watercolor, “Silver Maple.”

There’s something fascinatingly grotesque yet beautiful about Harding’s graphite drawing, “Goldenrod Bunch Gall,” a tour-de-force in rendering the complexity of abnormal leaf growth caused by an egg-laying insect. While much of its energy went into this compensating growth, the goldenrod still mustered the fortitude to grow a small blossom which appears like a triumphant, if tiny, flourish lifting above the gall.

Harding’s passion for botanical art began eight years ago when she was concurrently enrolled in the Maryland Master Naturalist program and a botanical art class that D’Zmura was teaching.

She explained, “The two classes were very interdependent for me in terms of awakening to the mysteries of the natural world and learning to depict them.”

D’Zmura earned a Certificate in Botanical Art in 2008 from Brookside Gardens School of Botanical Art and Illustration and went on to teach there and at Adkins Arboretum. Much of her recent work is concerned with the concept of Wabi-Sabi and the natural cycles of growth, aging and decay.

A short paragraph posted on the wall explains, “Wabi-Sabi is an ancient Japanese art aesthetic which embraces beauty as imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is the acceptance of the beauty found in imperfection and the natural cycle of growth and decay, of aging with dignity and grace.”

Throughout their paintings and drawings, both artists celebrate these natural changes. There’s the luscious, dead-ripe fruit in Harding’s “Paw Paw,” the bare, sweeping stems of D’Zmura’s “Single Anemone” with its cluster of dried leaves so exquisitely delicate that you can almost feel them crinkle, and the startlingly dramatic fan striped with blue, black and white in Harding’s “Blue Jay Wing.” These are not idealized nature portraits. They show the flaws and tell the stories of the lives of their subjects. Rich and thought-provoking, they will invite you to slow down, look closely and deepen your understanding of the cycles of nature.

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Art Review: Considering “Trees” at MassoniArt By Mary McCoy

September 6, 2019 by Mary McCoy

My studio is shaded by two big black walnut trees. I’m kind of in love with them. They have this huge, green, calming presence that settles my nerves and makes me want to write and make art about the beauty, intricacy and wisdom that I feel radiating from the natural world around me. Somehow, they link me into a more solid reality than my fleeting human worries and ambitions.

Living on a riverside farm and working on the art program at Adkins Arboretum, I think I can safely claim that I know something of the power that nature has on creative work. After all, nature is all about creativity. We who work in the arts do well when we follow its lead.

I also know something about climate change. While politicians stupidly argue about whether it’s real, I see the river rippling up into the marsh beside our house every new moon and full moon and too often, watch it creep around the trees at the edge of our yard and lap across the lawn ever closer to the corner of our house. And I cringe at how the top leaves of our coral bark maple, which a friend of ours raised from a seed, have turned crinkly brown each of these past three Augusts, and I grieved last year when the red bud we planted at the edge of the yard succumbed to saltwater intrusion.

Grace Mitchell – Forest Series #1

Like nearly everyone else these days, I’m gazing at a glowing screen as I type these words. But through incredible good luck (and many years of hard work), I’m sitting not in an air-conditioned cubicle or even a carpeted living room, but beside a screen door where the sound of cicadas blows in with the breeze and the dappled light filtering through the black walnut leaves dances across the floor.

Most people these days live in the artificial light and air and sound of indoors. Most people know climate change as a news story, another “issue” on the long list we should be addressing. Those of us who spend a lot of time outdoors feel it in our bones.

Generations ago, people lived on the land and were attuned to its daily and seasonal changes. Every indigenous culture had stories about their land, stories which told them when the winter would come and the spring thaw, how to conjure the stealth to stalk deer, and which trees to go to for food and medicine.

Emily Kalwaitis, “Encapsulated Forest”

The old stories are lost and forgotten along with an instinctive love for the land and the innate need to honor it. Watching what’s happening to this good earth, I’ve often wondered whether I could’ve served better by going into the sciences—ecology leaps to mind—in order to help stem the tide of environmental degradation. But while we need science to help us comprehend the complexities of our ecological systems, we also need art. It’s the artists who are searching out the stories, tapping into archetypal truths, and working to recover a deep understanding of our relationship with the earth.

Ecoart is a rapidly expanding genre. Look it up in Wikipedia and you’ll find citations dating back more than half a century, but these days, you find it everywhere. More and more artists are concentrating on environmental issues, more and more galleries and museums are presenting shows focused on their work. Throughout history, artists have been in the vanguard of change, and what we need now is a thorough change in our outlook toward how to live harmoniously on this fragile earth.

It’s really smart of MassoniArt to focus this show on trees. Climate change is a huge subject encompassing literally all aspects of life on earth. It’s daunting to even think about it. But a tree, that’s something we can relate to. Trees stand upright, like we do. They grow and change with the seasons. They give us shade and make our landscape beautiful, and they are potent symbols in our mythologies and our religions. Possibly more than any other living being, trees give us a visceral, one-on-one sense of the presence of the natural world.

It’s that visceral feeling that engages us, that makes a towering tree, a swooping osprey or a sunlit landscape real to us, that pulls at the heartstrings. If you’re sitting in front of a glowing screen ensconced in the virtual world, how will you know that the natural balance is so far off-kilter? And why would you care?

If you’re not physically present in the natural world, if you don’t go outside, it’s easy to ignore the changes in our environment and to live in complacency. But step out the door and feel the stifling heat. Notice the dying trees at the river’s edge where rising water has undercut their roots.

Let me make a seemingly simplistic statement: Our problem is that too many people these days don’t have friends who are trees. Trees teach us about growth and patience, about the cycle of the seasons, about cooperation (have you ever noticed how trees growing in close proximity will make space for one another’s branches?), about being intimate with the physical earth. Spend a little time with the artworks in this exhibit. Feel the fecund innocence of the leaves and flowers growing along Emily Kalwaitis’s young girl’s thigh, let the impenetrable black of Grace Mitchell’s primordial forest send prickles of fear up your spine, see your own face mirrored in the heart of Ken Schiano’s leafy tree.

It’s important to be aware of the accumulating facts about rising water, changing weather patterns and soaring extinction rates, but these teach the rational mind what’s happening. It’s equally vital to open the heart and the soul to the challenges we must face. When we do this, we embrace something deeper than data-crunching, we dip into the creative depths of nature itself. And there we may indeed find the impetus and the wisdom to address this catastrophic situation.

“Trees” is on view at MassoniArt September 6 through October 13. For more information, visit www.massoniart.com.

Art Review: John Gossage and Matthew Moore at the AAM by Mary McCoy

March 7, 2019 by Mary McCoy

There’s some very intriguing photography on view in three of the Academy Art Museum’s four galleries through April 7. A roomful of newly acquired works by such prominent photographers as Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, William Eggleston, Lisette Model, and Bruce Nauman gives a brief taste of the startling breadth of photography’s range over the past century, but it’s the two other galleries, one with John Gossage’s work and the other with Matthew Moore’s, that will really leave you thinking.

Gossage is a well-known photographer living in Washington who taught at the University of Maryland College Park and who exhibits internationally. On view is “The Pond,” his 1985 series of black-and-white images shot in the vicinity of an unremarkable pond at the edge of a city. Unremarkable is the operative word, because Gossage focuses on its humdrum situation surrounded by ragtag trees, dusty paths and tangled vines bordering on a human landscape of suburban houses and their attendant chain link fences and power wires. A distinctly prosaic tableau is revealed that we know all too well is repeated thousands of times across the country wherever neighborhoods meet natural landscape. There’s nothing of the iconic richness and beauty found in Ansel Adams’s elegant “Cedar Tree and Maple Leaves” just across the hallway. Gossage presents these peripheral landscapes exactly as he finds them, brambled, scraggly, strewn with trash, and mostly overlooked.

John Gossage, image from “The Pond,” vintage gelatin silver print

But as you peruse these 47 photos (also published as a book), they get under your skin. However unremarkable their setting, they are photographed so skillfully, with such clarity of detail and evenness of tone, that their blandness seems almost exquisite. Every leaf, twig and blade of grass is clearly visible and acknowledged in Gossage’s photographs so that, perversely, they embody both the human longing for nature and our blatant disinterest in its existence. In titling his series “The Pond,” Gossage slyly built in an oblique but nagging reference to Walden Pond and Thoreau’s insatiable curiosity and Transcendentalist awe in exploring its every detail. In Gossage’s landscapes, the human presence is instead one of indifference, conspicuously devoid of any sense of wonder.

Upstairs, Easton photographer Matthew Moore’s “Post-Socialist Landscapes” bear some notable similarities to Gossage’s in that his photographs also draw their impact not from being beautiful, but from the deadpan, black-and-white austerity of their compositions and their crisp and intricate detail. An Associate Professor and Visual Arts Department Chair at Anne Arundel Community College, Moore shares Gossage’s fascination with the human presence in the landscape, but with a focus on how societies use landscape, particularly urban spaces, to manipulate our views of history. This series, shot during a 2014 residency at the Vilnius Academy of Arts’ Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, records the aftermath of Soviet occupation in photographs that fall into three categories.

Matthew Moore, “Stalin, Prague, Czech Republic, 2014,” pigment print

One explores the crumbling military structures that were used to maintain power. There are former bunkers and machine gun nests being slowly overrun by graffiti and grass. The disused blast berms on Estonia’s Turisalu Missile Base are now so blanketed with small trees and wildflowers that they resemble Bronze Age barrows, transformed into just another bit of history buried in the ground.

A second group records public spaces where statues of Lenin, Stalin or both once stood. In some, the only remaining evidence is a cluster of ornamental bushes or an odd stretch of vacant pavement, while in “Lenin, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2014,” a visible scar still remains in the form of a bare spot smack dab in the center of a plaza. In a shot of Letna Hill in Prague, the huge pedestal that once held a 51-foot-tall statue of Stalin overlooking the city below has been repurposed to support an enormous metronome whose ticking provides a constant reminder of Czech struggles under Soviet communist rule.

In the third category, Moore documents the temporary resting places of these statues. The effect is sometimes comic, as when he discovered a discarded sculpted head of Lenin in a backyard in Estonia between some rubble and a flowering shrub. Others, such as busts of both Lenin and Stalin stored on stacks of wooden pallets, feel far more ominous. Like Prague’s ticking pendulum, they hold a warning that without vigilance, the political pendulum might easily swing back again.

Moore’s work and Gossage’s create a curious dialogue. While Moore explores how we consciously use landscape to promote agendas, Gossage documents what may be an even darker side of human nature—how little we notice or care about how we affect the land. Although both artists can legitimately be termed landscape photographers, their works expose far more about human proclivities than about the landscape we inhabit.

Art Review: Review: 60th Anniversary Members Show at the Academy Art Museum by Mary McCoy

December 21, 2018 by Mary McCoy

There’s a double celebration going on at the Academy Art Museum. Formally marking the culmination of a year-long celebration of this flourishing community museum’s 60th anniversary, its Annual Members’ Exhibition, on view through January 13, is very much a celebration of the vitality of art on the Eastern Shore. With works by 184 artists, an impressive number for our rural area, it’s a lively, colorful show and if the cliché may be excused, has something for everybody.

As might be expected, there are many beautiful Eastern Shore landscapes with shimmering water, quiet marshes and farmlands. Some of these paintings and photographs are realistic, some are more abstract or even cartoonish, but together, they sketch a rich portrait of this region. Towering clouds dwarf a cluster of barns in Gail McConaughy’s lush “Storm Building,” while sunset’s afterglow casts a blush of pink on the calm water around a small boat in Diane DuBois Mullaly’s “By the Light of the Moon.” There are boaters, crabbers, clammers, docks and a lighthouse, as well as herons and ospreys and even a slightly cynical chicken in “Grandma Poses” by Irene Aspell.

Gail McConaughy, “Storm Building,” oil

But in addition to landscapes, there are portraits, ceramics, jewelry, fiber art, sculptures, still lifes, and an impressive array of floral art. Some of the most memorable are Katherine Allen’s elegant fabric collage with its sooty paint stains spritzed with hand-stitching and French knots, Pamela Into’s unusual pair of vases molded from bok choy leaves, and Abby Ober Radford’s understated “Roses, Roses, All the Way” with its luscious brushstrokes just barely fleshing out rose petals and glints of light on a stack of teacups.

Katherine Allen, “My Year of the Dragon,” fiber collage

Several of the works will tease at your thoughts even after you’ve left the exhibit. Matthew Moore’s photographs of three empty pedestals, each surrounded by grass and fallen leaves, is strangely haunting and conjures questions of what memorials they may have held and how they came to be missing. Startlingly alike with their shaggy white hair and irascible expressions, two self-portraits by twin brothers, David and James Plumb, will make you wonder about sibling relationships and the nature of individuality. And while Kevin Garber’s tiny rhinoceros sheathed in colorful postage stamps from around the world seems at first to be a cheery little sculpture, a closer look turns it worrisome. The stamps covering its body depict exotic animals and plants, while those on its pedestal show symbols of the countries that produced them. Given the rhino’s dangerously falling population, poaching and endangered species leap to mind, as do politics and nationalism.

Kevin Garber, “Endangered,” mixed media

To help commemorate its 60th anniversary, the Museum suggested artists might submit works with 60 as their theme, resulting in several depictions of its picturesque exterior (still topped by its 1820 school bell tower), as well as a number of works incorporating the number 60. These include Peter Hanks’s painting of a gigantic crab weighing in at 60 on a scale that spells “Happy Birthday” and Constance Del Nero’s inventive “Population” with its tiny blister packs sculptured into 60 cartoon faces. One particularly satisfying work is Scott Sullivan’s sketchbook containing 60 skillfully drawn charcoal portraits.

Matthew Moore, “Pedestals,” pigment print

This show is itself a portrait of the broad spectrum of artists here on the Eastern Shore. There are many levels of accomplishment included, from more amateur works to pieces by artists such as William Willis, Katherine Allen and David Douglas who have been featured in solo shows at the Museum, as well as Matthew Moore, whose thought-provoking series of photographs, “Post-Socialist Landscapes,” will be exhibited at the Museum in March and April.

The sheer bounty of artworks in this exhibit makes it a spirited celebration of the Museum and its community of artists. Formerly held in the summer months, it makes for great holiday viewing and reinforces the sense that, with its full schedule of exhibits, classes, events, concerts and outreach programs, we are fortunate to have such an active and engaging community museum in our midst.

Mid-Shore Arts: A Review of Jo Smail and Paul Jeanes at the Kohl by Mary McCoy

November 13, 2018 by Mary McCoy

You can tell from the title that “Clippings, Voids and Banana Curry” is going to be fun. On view through December 9 at Washington College’s Kohl Gallery, it brings together the work of Jo Smail and Paul Jeanes, two artists from very different backgrounds, who became friends when both were teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art.

At first, it seems to be an odd pairing. Jeanes’s large, powerful paintings unquestionably dominate the gallery with their stark black-and-white slanting shapes, but it’s Smail’s tiny collages that will draw you in like magnets. Shortly, you almost forget about Jeanes as you slip into reading the ’50’s and ’60’s vintage recipes, smiling at the ads for outmoded ladies’ undergarments, and shaking your head at the strangely polite newspaper articles on issues surrounding apartheid.

Jo Smail, collages: digital prints, acrylic and cardboard on paper mounted on board

Smail was born and raised in South Africa, and when she brought a bag full of her mother’s old recipes (including one for banana curry) home from a recent visit, she discovered articles and ads on the back of some of the recipes clipped from newspapers that stand as cultural artifacts of the country during its apartheid years.

Although Smail is primarily an abstract painter, she layered scans of the clippings along with many handwritten recipes and old envelopes into playful compositions of understated color and texture. Floating an inch or so from the wall, these dozens of collages seem to dance, one after another, across the walls of the gallery in a collection hovering between nostalgia and immediacy. Simultaneously engaging and edgy, they call to mind a time when cheerful Afrikaner women, in dresses tailored to the latest American pointy bras and waist-trimming foundation garments, ostensibly found fulfillment in whipping up new recipes every day, while blissfully ignoring the race-based poverty outside their kitchen doors.

Unframed and eschewing the usual rectangular format, Smail’s collages take their complicated shapes from the multiple angles of the clippings, punctuated here and there with offhand painted shapes. Sometimes gestural, sometimes almost evoking an object (one resembles a cartoon time bomb), these painterly elements nimbly introduce a certain animating awkwardness, possibly a metaphor for the deep flaws in the prim culture evoked by the clippings. Casual and often comical, her collages hum with a portentous tension not unlike that underlying our own times.

Paul Jeanes, “Projection Painting #3,” oil on linen on panel

Curiously, Jeanes’s paintings and inkjet prints possess a similar bracing tension, though it reverberates more in the body than the mind. Jeanes teases optical quandaries by playing mercilessly with perspective. What our eyes want to interpret as the four panes of a window in “Project Painting #3” just won’t quite come together. The edges of the “panes” tilt in irreconcilable directions and don’t quite line up. Sometimes, they even shift directions as if bending back or forward. It’s a visual conundrum that both fascinates and sets your teeth on edge.

To complicate matters further, there’s a creeping realization that super-subtle angled shapes deriving from nothing more than a change in the sheen of the black paint float behind the white shapes. As you grow attuned to these nuances, you begin to notice that the empty white “panes” are not voids, but are alive with evidence of underpainting mingled with the woven texture of the underlying linen panel. A weird sensation of physicality vies with the painting’s tense geometry as the very idea of illusory space held within a static picture plane dissolves.

In his inkjet prints, Jeanes hints that his process begins with observations of actual objects or places. There’s no telling what they really are (a theater stage? a book? a sunbeam slanting across a floor?), but he photographs phenomena that interest him then prints them and cuts them up, rearranges them, experiments, and finally, projects them onto linen or canvas to create his final paintings. Unlike Smail, he prefers his sources to remain anonymous, and he works on a large enough scale that you feel like you could walk into one of his paintings and be lost in an hallucinatory world of shifting perspectives.

More than 30 years her junior and with less exotic roots in North Carolina, Jeanes nonetheless approaches the creative process with the same open, exploratory spirit that Smail cultivates. Curiosity and playful humor energize both artists’ works and make them fun to look at, but it’s the tension of incompatible viewpoints that keep them loitering in the mind. The impossibility of the coexistence of privilege and equality summoned by Smail’s collages and the irreconcilable viewpoints implied by Jeanes’s paintings prod and probe at our settled understandings of the world we live in.

Review: Jay Fleming at the Academy Art Museum by Mary McCoy

October 17, 2018 by Mary McCoy

While the Academy Art Museum continues to celebrate its 60th anniversary with its downstairs galleries filled with a wide-ranging and fascinating exhibit of works drawn from its permanent collection, upstairs is a remarkable little show by Annapolis photographer Jay Fleming.

Inventive and spectacular are two good words for describing Fleming’s photographs. There’s only the tip of the bow of a boat showing in his photo, “Sinking Workboat,” as it is engulfed by the waves. It’s such a startling image that it’s hard to imagine how he ever managed to shoot it. Its splashing water is so clear and fresh and the deep water surrounding the boat is so dark and foreboding that it’s like a dream, or in the context of this show, a nightmare.

Fleming’s exhibit, “Island Life,” on view through November 11, documents life on the Chesapeake’s only inhabited offshore islands, Smith Island and Tangier Island. Preserving traditions dating back to the islands’ settlement in the late 1600s, many of the islanders still make their living from the Bay’s waters, but rising sea levels, subsiding land and environmental stresses on the Bay and the species it supports threaten both their homes and their livelihoods.

Jay Fleming, “Sinking Workboat,” archival matte canvas print

The mingling of exquisite beauty and a sense of wrenching loss so apparent in “Sinking Workboat” is repeated throughout this show. The shimmering warmth of low sunlight on a venerable workboat is made poignant by its name, spelled out in peeling paint along its bow, “Last Call,” while across the gallery is “Abandoned House on Smith Island,” a shot of a weathered and broken-windowed home standing bravely amidst scraggly bushes and weeds.

The son of a National Geographic photographer, Fleming has his father’s skill at documentation, and he uses his talents and deep knowledge of the Chesapeake region both to earn a living as a commercial photographer and to pursue his passion for documentary art. His photographs are often seen on the covers of such magazines as Wooden Boat and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Save the Bay, and he recently published a stunning book of photographs called Working the Water that chronicles the lives of the Bay’s watermen.

What sets Fleming’s work apart is not just his skill and his easy familiarity with human interactions with the Bay and its creatures, but perhaps most importantly, his dazzling ability to make change visible. Heart-wrenching photos of abandoned houses have become ubiquitous in articles about rising sea levels, but Fleming captured his standing in eerie stillness while a flight of blackbirds swoops away under a lowering sky. A riveting glimpse of the last moment before the birds disappear and the fury of the storm begins, it’s a potent metaphor for the plight of these sinking islands and the loss of a way of life.

Jay Fleming, “Abandoned Skiff,” archival matte canvas print

It’s a puzzle how Fleming manages to create many of these photographs. Somehow, he’s in the right place at the right time, focused and ready to shoot. “Rockfish and Blue Crab” captures these iconic denizens of the Bay together in an underwater double portrait so crisp and colorful that, again, it seems as if it’s out of a dream. Likewise, “Above the Buyboat Delvin K” catches a graceful dance of oyster boats seen from above as they shimmy up to a buy boat to transfer their daily catch. It’s pure beauty, and it’s all about fleeting moments and changing times, laced through with the inkling that what we’re seeing will never be the same.

There’s magic in these photographs, and though we long for preservation and stability, it’s intoxicating to see one scene after another teetering on the edge of change. Still, Fleming conjures a certain optimism in the beauty and clarity of his photographs and in his ability to see familiar things anew. With its bow bearing a curious resemblance to the pointed arch of a shrine, a skiff left to decay in the marsh is a forlorn sight at first glance, but inside is a sign of renewal and hope in the form of a bird’s nest complete with eggs. Change is inevitable whether through human effort or by nature reclaiming its own, but these photographs suggest that by paying attention, there may still be ways to instigate positive changes for the Bay and those of us who live and visit here.

Mid-Shore Arts: Listening to the Earth Art of Stewardship at RiverArts by Mary McCoy

April 17, 2018 by Mary McCoy

An egret stalks through the dark water of a marsh in Karen Klinedinst’s iPhoneography print “The Scout.” With its painterly touches and eerie glow, it’s strange and dreamlike, and it gets immediately under your skin. As environmental artists and the curators of this year’s annual “The Art of Stewardship” show at RiverArts, Howard and I chose the theme “Listening to the Earth” to encourage artwork and poetry that, like Klinedinst’s, is inspired by paying close attention to the world around us. What we were looking for is the kind of honed awareness that germinates an open, honest understanding of our situation and responsibilities as part of the community of this earth.

Karen Klinedinst’s iPhoneography print “The Scout.

Does art have the power to effect change? It’s hard to forget an image like “The Scout.” It’s achingly beautiful, yet there’s death everywhere. Rotting vegetation and the skeletons of trees are part and parcel of this intricate and delicate environment. A marsh is a fertile place where fish and crabs spawn and egrets find abundant food, yet stay on high alert lest they, in turn, become dinner for an eagle or raccoon. The strength of Klinedinst’s image is that it takes in and reveals the wholeness of this place. The making of a powerful painting or a poem requires a journey into attentive awareness. It’s a fascinating and nourishing process not only for the artist but for viewers as well, if they, too, approach it with similar open, inquisitive mindfulness

Kate McGraw’s poem, “A Boy and his Dandelion,” may seem at first to be chiefly about a child’s sense of wonder at seeing the flower’s seeds fly into the air, but it’s much more. McGraw summons the thrust of the wind and the scents radiating from the boy’s warm body, skillfully pulling us into the physicality of the moment. She uses words to paint the gossamer, glinting fragility of the tufted seeds and the mystery of where they are going, complete with a hint of their procreative objective. The boy himself imagines them as paratroopers, bravely adventuring into unknown places, and with this, a tingle arises in the back of the mind. This is a primitive urge—to ascribe intention to inanimate objects, to think of them as having aspirations and emotions, in short, as having consciousness.

What leaps to mind is the beliefs of indigenous people in tree spirits, water spirits and the like. These are people who live intimately with the land, aware of its every mood and cycle and the intricacy of the relationships of its plants and animals. Like Klinedinst’s egret, they are wholly dependent on their environment. Far from being quaint and naïve, might their superstitions have a certain wisdom? If we think of animals and plants as having consciousness, however different from our own, we might pay more attention to the ways they live and how their interactions and well-being affect our own survival. Such an approach would develop empathy for species besides our own and encourage a developing understanding of the interdependence of all life on earth.

There’s a prickly sensation of taut vitality emanating from the antler forms in William Willis’s large painting. They feel alive and

Who’s Afraid of the Dark by William Willis

sentient. Behind them are half-hidden forms, perhaps an animal hide stretched to dry, a bowl, a doorway, an abstracted tree—layers of activity and history giving witness to Willis’s search to find vital force in his subject matter. There’s something almost scary about this painting which Willis acknowledges with the title “Who’s Afraid of the Dark.”

It’s actually quite unnerving to think that nature is alive and aware of us and that humans are by no means in control. Gary Irby succinctly calls up the creepy feeling of an animal watching from the shadows with the piercing eyes and bristling sticks of his sculpture “Nature’s Watching.” But even more powerfully, this work mischievously prods at the sense of guilt and looming doom that lurks in all of us in these days of runaway fossil fuel extraction, snowballing pollution and escalating climate change.

You might think that art and poetry about earth stewardship would tend to scold our profligate ways—or weep over them, but few of the works in this show could be classified as “protest art.” The closest are Irby’s “Nature’s Watching” and his ceramic pot with two talking heads conspicuously facing in opposite directions with the title “Discussing Selling our Environment.” Also in the running is Rebecca Clark’s “Oblivion” with its beach-goer blandly cocooned behind sunglasses and earbuds, oblivious to the devastations of storm and fire raging behind her.

Most of the show’s works are focused on exploring and celebrating the breadth of the subject: earth and its ecology. There are whales, domestic birds, wild birds, wild animals (deer, lions, elephants), insects, Eastern Shore waterscapes, and Antarctic ice. There is the vastness of huge clouded skies and the intimacy of a ladybug stalking aphids on a fragile flower.

Curiously, with the exception of Anita Kusick’s lush fields of flowers in “Gathering (Pike Farms – Conserved by Peconic Land Trust),” none of the works are about farming. Farmers are the principle stewards of land on the Eastern Shore, and it’s heartening to see more and more of them transitioning their land to organic from “conventional” farming (that is, planting Roundup-ready GMO crops managed with glyphosate and other chemicals). Likewise, it’s cheering to witness the widespread use of cover crops and forested shorelines to keep farm runoff out of waterways and to note the reintroduction of diverse crops and animal husbandry. Supported by a host of government programs, farmers are making a difference, as are hunters and organizations such as Ducks Unlimited that work to reestablish healthy habitats for wildlife.

“Nature’s Watching” by Gary Irby

In the call for submissions, we said “Art should bristle with energy and keep tugging at your thoughts.” It’s only when art has this kind of power to stimulate thought and encourage further investigation that it can trigger change for the better. The sense of childlike wonder that so many of these poems and artworks evoke is crucial in reshaping of our attitudes, and the edgy sense of danger in several of them acts as a much-needed spur to work for sustainable ways to live harmoniously with our earth.

If we fail in this, it’s serious. Life on earth will likely continue, though predications are that numerous species, including humans, will have disappeared and insects will be dominant. Quilter Christine Kamon chose to accompany her graceful “Dragonflies” with a quote from writer and artist Clive Barker that posits an idyllic future time when all traces of humans and our activities will be long gone and dragonflies and hummingbirds will flit in a golden afternoon. It’s a beautiful scene but one we’d like to postpone as long as possible.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

Recommended reading:
David Abram’s Becoming Animal
David Hinton’s Hunger Mountain
Andy Goldsworthy’s Time

Exhibition Dates: April 4 – 25
RiverArts
315 High Street, Suite 106
Chestertown, MD 21620 United States

Art Review: Joanne S. Scott at RiverArts by Mary McCoy

February 15, 2018 by Mary McCoy

Visiting Joanne Scott’s show, Elements, at RiverArts is almost like visiting her studio. On view through February 25, it’s a chance to see what this accomplished Chestertown artist is working on currently, but you also get a fascinating taste of her work over the past five decades.

Half the show presents recent work, intriguingly mixed with an equal number of works dating back as far as 1965. It’s a teasing glimpse, kind of a half retrospective, of Scott’s fresh and engaging work, and it makes you wish you could see more.

Deeply influenced by her many years of living near the water, both in the Chesapeake region and on Maine’s Monhegan Island, Scott is primarily a landscape painter. She explores both open vistas and intimate views of the living world, always experimenting with color, composition and ways of capturing the mood of each moment. Throughout her work, there’s a sense of awe at the beauty and pure aliveness of the natural world.

“Orme’s Buy Boat,” watercolor 1972

The broad marsh flooded with light in “River Marsh,” an acrylic painting from 2017, hums with vitality as the billowing, heat-hazed trees beyond lean inward as if in conversation with two luminous white clouds. In her close-up paintings of flowers, such as “Eight Poppies” from 1985, each blossom is an individual, full of energy and character. The effect is even more so in her three new poppy watercolors painted in 2017 where each flower is animated with sketchy pencil lines and crisp washes in delicate shades of pink casually but succinctly defining their papery petals.

In work that is all about close observation, Scott explores how shadow sculpts the deck of a buy boat, how leaves spread out to catch sunlight, and how the weightlessness of a luminous moon underscores the quietude of the nocturnal earth below. Her work has always hovered between realism and abstraction. Sheets of ice around a boat dissolve into washy fields of textured color, while the clouds towering over a flat Eastern Shore landscape become a study of color and radiant energy.

Part of the pleasure of Scott’s work is that she celebrates the things we love so much about the outdoors. There’s a warm, familiar feeling about her water-rounded pebbles, graceful boats and rippling water. Without pretension or romanticizing, she paints them in a clear, forthright way.

But while her work may seem effortless, there’s a great deal of skill and planning behind it, and it’s fun to scout out her methods in the underlying sketches and the layers of brushstrokes describing shimmering light and water. Through decades as a working artist and teacher of drawing and painting, Scott has honed her process, and there’s a sense throughout this show that she revels in finding both bold and nuanced ways to convey her experience of each scene. Perhaps that’s why she included “Belfast Series #3 Study and Print” from 1986. It offers a fascinating look at how the study, a confident pencil sketch of light and shadow falling across a gabled house, served as a planning tool for the print, an inviting aquatint etching.

“Heron Point Look Out,” a watercolor from 2011, says a lot about her skill in conveying her deep affection for our watery landscapes. In this snow scene, she captured a grove of slim trees glimpsed in a slow, graceful dance as if mimicking the marshy creek below as it winds out to the river. Masterfully simplifying her forms, a few strokes of gray wash convey a distant riverside house and the merest suggestion of Chestertown bridge beyond.

“Heron Point Look Out,” watercolor, 2011

There’s something about the work of an elder artist that is spare and radiant—look at de Kooning’s late paintings or Matisse’s cut-outs. Scott, too, has found this uncomplicated simplicity, and it’s a pleasure to share in her appreciation as she reveals our familiar world in pencil and paint.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

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