Invited to paint area landscapes

Mid-May brought artists from 17 states to participate in Wayne Art Center's Sixth Annual Plein Air Festival. Most of the 23 artists accepted for this increasingly competitive event came from a distance and were guests of local families while painting landscapes in and around Wayne for five festival days. The weather cooperated, and the art center hung the work as fast as it came in - hundreds of paintings, all for sale.

Shelby Keefe, a full-time artist from Milwaukee, deservedly won two awards, best in show and Plein Air Magazine's prize, for an oil landscape portraying Ithan and one of Center City, respectively. These works have a rich texture and solid force about them.

There were fewer watercolors than oils this year, and that scarcity attracted me to several spontaneous watercolors, their figures or shapes seeming about to move - as do leaves in the sunlight and reflections in puddles in work by Tracey Frugoli, Ken Karlic, and Mick McAndrews, whose touch is light, airy, bright, and very welcome.

I'd love to have seen additional studies of stately trees like Michael Kotarba's ancient sycamore, Big Brother. Various small studies of Boathouse Row and the riverfront are memorable, as is Paul Bachem's take on downtown Wayne.

Once again, this spirited "annual" demonstrates its potential to be an ever-more-popular favorite with local audiences.

Ever see a group show by one of those "intertwined networks" of painters who studied in graduate school under certain influential teachers before going their separate ways? Put together thoughtfully, such a show can deliver lots of insights.

Gross McCleaf Gallery is offering "The Landscape Abstracted," featuring eight area painters, five of whom have fairly recent master of fine arts degrees from Penn, and two who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Looking around the show, it's easy to spot some truly remarkable talent among people whose work is dissimilar, yet somehow visually interconnected.

Unhesitatingly, I'd say the show's most impressive works are by Susan Ziegler and Eric Huckabee, who seem at opposite poles from each other stylistically at first glance, she Penn-trained, he at PAFA. Ziegler's single, very large, awesome landscape painting Promise of Escape has key elements both pictorially and emotionally. There's unity of color and atmosphere and something enigmatic about it. At the same time, it engages our eyes, giving us entrance into this panoramic scene that stretches into the far distance, so we're slow to take our gaze away from it. And even then, the image stays in our mind long after. Something highly unusual has been achieved, a fine balance between the specific and the abstract.

Alexis Serio's landscapes seem close to Ziegler's in containing large areas of saturated color and bands of evocative color that flow and mutate, drawing our eye toward the deep distance. Naomi Chung, by contrast, portrays hefty fractured flower forms across a surface.

Eric Huckabee, an academy master of fine arts and nonetheless this show's dedicated abstractionist, enjoys an enthusiastic early following. He wants abstract painting to be understood as a kind of constructed fiction directly experienced from a real response to relationships. Huckabee achieves particular distinction in several paintings that balance description and abstraction through the unifying means of color in ways that make a serious bid for originality. Other exhibitors are Martha Armstrong, Marlene Rye, Jenny Hager, and Pete Zebley.

Year after year, Seraphin has practiced one of the more original and successful approaches to regular display of art in our region's gallery scene. So it's not surprising that when it comes to staging an "Homage to the Barnes" exhibition, as it and several other city galleries are now doing, the resulting show reflects Seraphin's own image more than that of the new Barnes on the Parkway. But no matter. This is a straightforward, honest salute.

Hung salon-style (of course), the show ranges from 17th- and 18th-century drawings to modest works by prominent 20th-century artists Willem de Kooning (a circa 1970 charcoal drawing the artist gave Tony Seraphin), Walter Murch, Harry Bertoia, and a lively James Brooks, alongside characteristic paintings by Leon Golub and Benton Spruance, work by assemblagist George Herms, who came out of the Beat Generation, and two color-rich oils by abstract expressionist Michael Goldberg.

Meanwhile, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Sidney Goodman, James Brantley, Victor Vazquez, Phillip Adams, Brian Dickerson, Barbara Bullock, and Hiro Sakaguchi strikingly represent today, with a brief glimpse of solo shows forecast for painters Joan Wadleigh Curran and Ken Mabrey.