The first glance is not kind to Sukey Bryan's paintings. You walk into the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery, where the Stanford, California, artist's Sea Marks show remains through January 25, and blocks of navy and turquoise confront you. Hmm. Paintings of the sea. Waves. Foam.
But these are more than pretty pictures of water. They are examinations of the roiling of raw planetary forces, of wind and tide and gravity as expressed in water. And Bryan depicts moments of wave crest and settling foam with the facility of a Turner or a Homer.
In an artist's statement, Bryan says she explores parallels between natural and human events, but those connections are opaque, at least in this show. I suppose you perhaps could read into the painting "Lift" a correlation between the broadly curling upsweep of pale, sauterne tones and a sort of emotional uplift. But of greater interest is Bryan's skill in shaping with brush and palette knife this intimation of energy, and her keen sense of the color of water.
This is the case both in richly dynamic compositions, such as the vaguely menacing roll of "Tidal Wave 23," and in paintings in which Bryan invokes the beached end of these moments, such as the three-panel paintings, "After Wave" and "Rippling Rest." If you spend any amount of time on a beach, you will find these feathering pools are often more visually engaging than the more dramatic moments that preceded them.
But drama is hard to avoid, and fortunately Bryan handles instances of curl and crest assuredly. This is clear in the leaden depths of "Salt Deep 9," with its cleverly worked arrangement of gray-green, indigo and umber, rising to a pitch of cream foam, or in the less fierce but still pregnant "Break Break Break." Both arrest the instant a wave is about to crest. Part of their brilliance, and that of the entire suite of paintings here, is Bryan's reluctance to provide any reference point of land, horizon or even human artifice.
Corrugated concepts
I am going to break one of my cardinal rules and write about a show already gone. I wish I had managed to drag my sorry self to the Contemporary Arts Collective earlier to check out Manifesto of the Mundane, by Bill Morrison and Keith Conley.
Much of this show consisted of corrugated cardboard models of quotidian buildings and objects, the stuff of our lives we never notice, like a fast-food restaurant, highway overpass or even a home stereo system. The twists of irony were as plentiful as these artifacts' real-world counterparts. Reducing them to indistinct models points up the ubiquity and blandness of the articulated and detailed real objects, while at the same time reminding us, for better or worse, the key roles they play in our lives. And of course, one such object had to be the wall-mounted security camera.
Canny stuff, and another sign that the CAC remains a valuable resource for thoughtful art in this city.
Talking the talk
Speaking of thoughtfulness, it's worth noting that the Las Vegas Art Museum is bringing the editor and publisher of ARTNews, Milton Esterow, to town for a talk. The Brooklyn native and former reporter for the New York Times will speak on How to Look at Art at 7 p.m., January 17, at the museum, 9600 W. Sahara Ave.
At 7 p.m., January 31, LVAM hosts an Art Critics Forum and Poetry Reading, with Donald Kuspit, Carter Ratcliff and others. I can't be sure about the poetry part of it, but it's good to see the museum bringing quality speakers to the city.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.