Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004260469
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ann Weinstein
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They present a positive program rather than an undirected protest. If they have lost a bit of their street-art urgency, they have gained the validity of examined convictions and intellectual purpose.
Graham's personal agenda is born of an entrenched political system. He clearly defines it in often ambiguous, agitated suggestive forms, many of which are human, without quite being identifiable. But the lighting is dark - a murky symbolic glow - and the cross-hatching is barbed. All the formal distortions conspire to evoke pain and anguish.
The control in Graham's painting provides a meditative edge, but it never inhibits a raw, deeply felt intensity. The resulting refinement is always subject to hard experience, interpretive deformity and the immediacy of unframed canvases edged with grommets.
If the viewer follows the numbered sequence of the paintings, there is a felt, non-academic logic to their progression. Otherwise there are unavoidable clues: a close-up of a knotted rope against a dimly lit background of ropy curves and textures; a central funnel shape surrounded by organic shapes; a dark, off-center funnel shape emerging from negative space; ragged nails, contorted shapes and deeply-lined, hard-worked hands.
"Night Time" and "Nightmare" are indistinguishible to Graham and, in a night scene of "Flesh and Fantasy," a not quite explicit figure floats in lurid clouds overhead.
Whether memory or fantasy, the allusion to body and genitalia in "Cruisin"' is confirmed by the closeup of a cramped female nude with thighs raised and spread. The torso is explicit without being anatomically detailed. But then, many of Graham's paintings, though less descriptive, are even more visceral.
In "Opening the City I," subliminal trees in a dark background suggest primal origins behind tones of reds and pinks with bodily implications. In the first (unnumbered) painting of the same title, a white, truncated figure in profile dominates the city below, with arm stretched out and hand gripping the edge of a wall. In another, the inference of wings possibly suggests a dark, distorted angel.
A stunted cross and a convoluted wall convey the struggle of "Breaking Down the Walls." And even "Homey," the most straightforward image in the show, is bleak and esoteric.
Graham's is a joyless world.
The show runs through May 31. The Harrison Museum of African American Culture, 523 Harrison Ave. N.W., is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
\ Miles Carpenter's work is cleanly carved and painted, instead of being assembled from odds and ends and bits and pieces. His exhibition of folk art in the Flossie Martin Gallery at Radford University has a unified, understated and technically competent demeanor not usually associated with folk art.
Anna Fariello, director of the gallery, explains that, unlike many folk artists, Carpenter was not hill folk. He was a working man, but he also was a member of the middle class, with some affluence and some sophistication. It shows in his work.
Born in 1889, Carpenter began carving consistently in the 1960s and showing in the '70s. The earliest work in the show, however, is a small wooden bird carved in 1940. It also appears to be the most primitive piece, primarily because the paint has worn.
But Carpenter's work, while it grew more ambitious through the years, did not change all that much. The only difference in two small pigs, one carved in 1941 and the other in 1972, is thirty years of wear. There are no discernable clues as to which came first in a group of blue jays, carved between 1974 and 1981 and bunched together on a sculpture stand.
Small individual pieces - a monkey or a reindeer - resemble toys. An anteater, with a "Belly Full of Ants," is quite literal. Others, also released from slightly altered branches, look quite playful. But, like much folk art, this is due to freshness of forms not bound by formal conventions. Some of the figures, like "Wounded Knee Indian" and "Rescuing Soldiers," are very serious - and compassionate. Carpenter was not only aware of the outside world, he was part of it.
Some pieces, like the realistically observed "Pigs to Mother" and "Girl in Her Sand Box," which contains actual sand, combine carving and construction. "Adam and Eve and the Serpent," the most complex piece in the show, introduces a small measure of mechanics, as well as the devil riding the serpent's tail.
Nowhere is Carpenter's humor more evident than in the naturalistic "Naked Man," with his interchangeable genitalia, and in the slightly bawdy "Early Bird." One wonders what Jesse Helms would make of it.
The mutations in the fantastic creatures, "Double Jaws" and a three-headed ". . . What's It," raise the naturally twisted distortions of "Siamese Twins" to ferocious mythical status.
The show runs through May 23. The Flossie Martin Gallery, Radford University, is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.
by CNB