"Cannon Ball, Boom" is a 4-foot-by-4-foot oil painting by Erik Gecas. It depicts a shoeless little girl, in a red dress with white trim, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees (the cannonball of the title). The viewer looks down at her, and she defiantly returns our gaze. Gecas, a sculptor, only recently switched to figurative painting, but his work has the confidence of someone who's been at it for a long time. To give his work a "strong physical presence," he feels that his figures need to be life-size. That could mean some awfully big paintings. The cannonball pose was his solution—it consolidates the figure into a life-size ball. He needed a background that would provide "a context that wasn't confusing," and he followed a train of thought from cannonballs to fortifications and fences represented in a schematic way—one horizontal and several vertical lines—thickly painted in shades of black. The contrast in color and mood between the figure and the background is startling and disturbing. When asked about the lack of motion in the figure, belying the title "Cannon Ball, Boom," he said, "Motion is off-limits." He might have said "Emotion is off-limits," because I think in his painting, his unconscious may be telling a more complex and interesting story about the need to defend oneself against and contain powerful emotions.
In a more lighthearted vein, the watercolorist Joyce Lee-Peterson is represented by two works, "Desert in Moonlight" and "Rising Moon," wonderful examples of the style she has perfected over years of devotion to her craft. Inciting the opprobrium of the watercolor society (as strict as the French Academy in its insistence on purity), she uses collaged elements in her compositions. Specifically, she crumples Japanese tissue papers in a plastic bag, then adds color and shakes it up (so "it does its own thing"). Then she tears and layers the pieces into images that suggest rock formations and—moving from the abstract to the representational—she adds petroglyphs of long-horned sheep. The effect is magical.
In "Cutty Sark and Tait Sing (Fast Arrow in Chinese)," William Hill depicts sailing ships in the minutest detail. In "Reflections," Aileen Dike delights in the texture of leaves reflected in a pool. In "Laguna Beach," Angel O'Bryant grabs the eye with sherbet colors spread across the canvas.
These are artists who paint out of a sheer love for their subject or medium, and even if they are technically amateurs, there is more than enough here to seduce the viewer.