Norman artists show highlights contrasts
NORMAN — There is a nice contrast between Debby Kaspari’s quiet scenes of nature and Don Holladay’s expressive works in two new exhibits.
Shows by the Norman artists run through Sept. 14, with a closing reception from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. that day, at Mainsite Contemporary Art, 122 E Main.
Meticulously rendered in soft pastel on sanded paper, Kaspari said her plein-air waterscapes “come entirely from many days in the field.”
Widely known as a bird artist, Kaspari downplays birds as a subject in work for this show, done in many states, always in “earshot of water.”
Among exceptions are glimpses of a magpie flying over a bend in New Mexico’s “Chama River” and of a tiny bird on “Cormorant Rock” in Maine.
She also leaves the buffalo out of her “Waiting for Bison” in Oklahoma, directing our attention instead to a big tree, sunlit grass and a muddy puddle.
Wonderfully panoramic, despite its small size, is her aerial view of a serpentine stretch of New Mexico’s “Rio Grande del Norte.”
A cottonwood branch seems to frame and point to Nebraska’s Platte River, while sunlight and shadow enhance shades of blue in Oklahoma’s “Kiamichi Headwaters.”
Holladay, a painter since 1973 — many of whose images “originate from the printmaking process” — offers us a good mix of expressionist, abstract and semirealistic influences.
A pale tornado funnel in a black sky appears to menace a flat, brightly sunlit field of grain in his “Harvest Interrupted” monotype, to name a case in point.
Strings and drips of oil-based house paint on canvas suggest the shine and glitter of “Morning Light,” in a painting inspired, in the best sense, by the work of Jackson Pollack.
Also powerfully abstract are the rough, angling red, yellow ocher and black black planes of his “Melting Pot,” and the stark yellow, red and white blocks of his “In Transit.”
But possessing perhaps even more crudely expressive power are Holladay’s figurative works.
A muddy-hued, mummy-like figure stands rigidly between two glamorous women, one with a blue parrot on her bare shoulder, in his “Sometimes There is No Reason” collage.
Fine netting, covering part of her face, and a head scarf give an aura of mystery to Holladay’s oil-collage of an “American Woman.”
Even more inscrutable is the dark figure confronting us in his “Friend or Foe” woodcut.
The Kaspari and Holladay shows are highly recommended during their run at Mainsite, which also has an installation by Norman artist Christopher Ryan Mackie.