‘Small Works’ painting exhibit has holiday feel
NORMAN — There is a festive, holiday feel to the seventh-annual exhibit of “Small Works” at The Depot Gallery, 200 S Jones, in Norman.
The eight artists seem to draw in their horizons from the expansiveness of summer but demonstrate fine feeling and deft technique.
In a well-executed oil landscape, Cletus Smith explores the broken reflections of trees in “Oodles of Puddles” on an overcast day.
Jim Cobb uses a brush or palette knife with great skill to reduce part of the “Taos Mountain” range to relatively small dimensions in an oil.
Other excellent oils by Cobb offer us a close-up encounter with the head of an “Abstract Cow” and a loosely brushed view of a “Grandson Fishing.”
In a fine monotype by Don Holladay, the pale silhouette of a figure at a “Border Crossing,” in front of dark earth and sky, becomes emblematic of migration.
A delicately rendered monarch butterfly on fall leaves becomes emblematic,
in a different way, of “Autumn in My Yard” for Connie Seabourn in a watercolor.
Moonlight seems to soften the outline of an adobe church and of a long cloud over a ridge in an oil painting on paper by Brad Price called “Trampas Nocturne.”
Carol Beesley shares with us a view through “My Mother’s Curtain and What She Saw From Her Window” in a small mixed media painting of a big red mesa.
A handwritten old post card is the focal point of an oil of “A Gray Day in Winter” by Corazon Watkins, who omits features, but not feeling, from her portrait of a boy named “Cal.”
A single porcupine quill visually punctuates the copper sails of an imaginary boat someone is about to “Launch,” in a small work on canvas by Sue Moss Sullivan.
The show of small yet exquisite and evocative works is highly recommended in its run through Dec. 22, with receptions from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Dec. 8 and 9.