It’s said that timing is everything, and Eric Joyner seems to have a wonderful sense of it. Working as an illustrator, he moved into fine art a few years ago when it became acceptable to cross the line between fine and commercial art. His choice of subject matter, Japanese toy robots, was also fortuitous given the craze for cute Japanese things. Now he’s contemplating moving to Las Vegas from San Francisco. Could his timing be right again? (Many arts districts have come into being because artists needed cheap space.) Are we poised to become the next art mecca? If Las Vegas can attract the likes of first-rate artist Eric Joyner with affordable housing, we might be on our way.
Joyner’s first exhibition in Las Vegas is a tasty sampling of his Robots & Donuts series. In commercial work artists are given the subject, but when Joyner made the transition to fine art he had to find his own subject matter. The toy robots he had been collecting since childhood seemed a perfect choice; their colorful, shiny surfaces had to be fun to paint. But he needed something for them to play off of. He tried and discarded many ideas until he intuitively paired avatars of masculinity (hard, metallic fighting machines) with symbols of femininity (sweet, round objects with a hole in the middle).
Being an illustrator at heart, he needed a story and hit on the idea of a war between robots and doughnuts (the battle of the sexes?). Not wanting to be confined to depicting only battles, Joyner envisioned a thousand-year saga in which periods of war alternate with periods of peace, opening up a world of visual possibilities. His robots can take vacations (“changeman visits rome”), engage in sports (“foolish challenger”) and even enjoy nature, as in “false spring,” a lovely depiction of a sleeping robot in a Monet-like landscape of puffy clouds and luxuriant grass. A print, “the fog of war,” illustrates how a zany premise in skilled hands can lead to the illusion of reality as robot ground troops and planes defend against an aerial attack by huge doughnuts. In peacetime the doughnuts become more acted upon than actors, but that doesn’t diminish their pictorial importance. Whether stacked up like boulders in “jawbreaker” or bunched together with other sweets in “harvest time,” they’re so juicily painted that they practically drip off of the canvas. The most charming and revealing painting is “unscheduled maintenance,” which depicts a doughnut-frosting assembly line. The primary-colored robot workers are themselves being “assembled”—an allegory for the art-making process as each robot tweaks the robot in front of it and the last one pours the sugary frosting onto the doughnuts.
If Joyner’s interplay of opposites is expressed in a narrative, Dolores Nast’s is played out over time in successive canvases. After receiving her MBA at UNLV in 1988, she took art classes for the “fun of it,” delighting in the fact that she hadn’t lost her touch after half a century working as a civil engineer and caring for her family. Studying with Bill Leaf, she rendered objects in colored pencil, delineating form and building volume with lines, then moved on to acrylic paints using slender brushes, but basically following the same procedure. Leaf often used fruits and vegetables in his still-life setups, and Nast was once inspired to bring home a bag of assorted onions to paint from. Something about their colors turned on a circuit in her brain. She had found her subject matter—fruits and vegetables—and hasn’t wavered since, scrutinizing such details as the veining in a lettuce leaf, the rough texture of a kiwi melon and the rich darks of an eggplant. “Summer and Winter Squash” and “North & South American Melons” are examples of works organized around a theme.
A few years ago she started painting with palette knives, alternating their use with brushes. Nast’s recent vision problems have made a virtue of necessity, since using palette knives is easier on the eyes. A wonderful tool for rendering texture, a palette knife’s heft allows you to slather thick gobs of paint into myriad configurations, and its relative quickness is responsive to fleeting impulses and sensations. The palette knife has freed Nast’s inner sybarite and allowed her work to soar. The best example is the prosaically titled but ecstatically painted “Three Artichokes,” a masterpiece of texture and color.
It’s a treat to see artists who have so much fun painting, making it so much fun for the viewer.
Eric Joyner: A Twist of Fate
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Through November 30, Trifecta Gallery in the Arts Factory, 366-7001
Recent Work by Dolores Nast
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Through November 30, Arts Factory Common Area