FINE ART: Snapshot of The Portrait

CAC looks at the modern portrait

Chuck Twardy

Connections is not your usual Contemporary Arts Collective show. No questing experiments, no querulous polemics, no quirks of paint. It's a quiet, contemplative consideration of the possibilities for contemporary portraiture.


Organized by Susanne Forestieri, an adept and experienced painter whose work was exhibited in a two-woman show last year at the Las Vegas Art Museum, Connections comprises portraits of people close to the participating four artists. Along with her own impressionistic views of family members and events, Forestieri has selected pieces by Daryl DePry, Sarah Pearson-Ochoa and Jerry Ross.


Pearson-Ochoa's work embraces both large, moody, pastel-transfer portraits and more classically inspired panel paintings. Her "Mother Daughter (diptych)" has the poise and air of a renaissance portrait. The profiles face each other like studies for the flip sides of a medallion or coin, the wood panels actually blocks about 6 inches deep. Her pastels locate their subjects in indeterminate space. In the portraits of the children, Wyatt, who squats with frog, and Vicky, who's seated cross-legged, their positions in the lower portion of the vertical space imply room to grow and the adults-eye view of a fragile, vulnerable soul.


Ross' paintings are more broadly but deftly limned. You can sense deep feeling for the subjects, but it's hard to say what it might be; they don't give up any secrets about themselves. The black-robed figure in "Corle LaForce" gazes off to the left somewhat pensively, but beyond that Ross tells you little. The women in "War Widow" and "La Studentessa" both sit quarter-profile looking ahead but nothing of facial mien differentiates them. It is not so much that they are enigmatic as they are aspectless. The titles are the source of mystery.


The richly toned monoprints of Daryl DePry are the most unlikely entries here, less portraits of individuals as depictions of types. Two young women of fiercely yellow flesh, fixed against a fire-red background, engage in dissolution in "Pinesol and Beer," while "Shots" finds another pair of women, possibly at a club (two men faintly register at a railing behind them), downing the title drinks. Yet "Father and Child," sketched in light Prismacolor on a birch panel, is a sensitive portrait of a man cradling an infant in his arms. Here the grain and tone of the wood is integral to the image's appeal.


It would be reasonable to describe Forestieri's small-scale oil paintings as "snapshots" (and, looking back, I have), but they are unposed and unmannered. "Uncle Fred and Ned with Shannon & Russel at their Wedding," for instance, captures a behind-the-scenes moment at an otherwise formal event. "My Mother & Daughter Visiting Aunt Jane" finds its subjects looking at the viewer, but it's oddly cropped, like those old family-album prints.


Looking up "snapshot" online, I came across this quote from educator John A. Kouwenhoven: "No painting can tell the truth of a single instant; no snapshot can do anything else." It is as if Forestieri is trying to make a painting tell an instant's truth—such as a teenager's concern about a parent's superintending in "My Daughter Gina & Her Boyfriend Edwin at Beach Cafe."


Like a lot of CAC shows, this one suggests something that should be done on a larger scale, a comprehensive look at the portrait, here and now. But Connections is a satisfying, if small attempt.

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