Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005100440
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANN WEINSTEIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Dr. Betty Tisinger, a professor of art at Virginia Commonwealth University who curated the exhibition, introduced Yeatts to the applause of an overflow crowd at the opening festivities on May 6 that celebrated the achievements of his artistic career.
Yeatts was among those who helped establish an arts scene in Roanoke. He was the first director of the Roanoke Fine Arts Center, the predecessor of the the museum. The center's first annual budget was all of $400, though Yeatts says they were grateful to get it.
An artist of intellectual substance and integrity, Yeatts has influenced several generations of area artists as teacher and friend, and set quality standards for those who follow. In the course of his career, his work has developed from representational to abstract, from academic to poetic, from experimental to profound.
Because my husband is a member of the board of directors for the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, I have not reviewed shows at the museum for the past several years in adhering to the policy of this newspaper. This show is no exception. But as this newspaper's art critic, I could not let the opportunity pass at least to mention the show of such a significant artist and to wish Jim well for the next 50 years.
Ned Rifkin, chief curator for exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, jurored the 11th annual City Art Show, sponsored by the Arts Council of the Roanoke Valley.
In presenting the awards for the show, Rifkin said that he had looked for intensity and passion in the works. This is a perfect description of John Clingempeel's haunting paintings, which was named best-in-show.
Washed with the lurid glow of hot or cold light, his doomsday landscapes look like an apocalypse of fire or ice. Their uneven, encaustic surfaces endow them with the conviction of physical substance.
Clingempeel's small, untitled images are strangely at odds with the rest of the show, much of which is figurative and photographic. The expressionist intensity of his work is in contrast to rest of the show - the flat surface of the photographic prints, and the relatively few paintings, which are also are flatly textured.
Suzanne Morgan's crowded oils, like photographs by Don Petersen and Timothy Shepherds, are intensely colored. Julie Williams' somber, subtle canvas gleams with sparse metallic daubs, while David Smith uses angled thrusts and tensions to push the narrative in his close, contained oil.
Richard Gans' wall relief contrasts the tactile tension of a constructed organic armature, covered in a taut skin of sutured nylon hose, with the geometric structure from which it extends.
The clean, technically correct turn of thick plate steel, in the contained trajectory of Frederic Crist's free-standing sculpture, validates its experienced surface, which is marked by process.
Deeply shadowed, Jefferson Steele's colored photograph of painted, warped and rusted steel promotes the illlusion of sculptural dimension.
Ed Dolinger paints an angular wood and tin wall relief with expressionistic scrawls and a delicate stenciled flower. Previously hung in the traveling Artemis Art Show that opened in December, this piece is reproduced on the cover of the Artemis XIII journal.
It is interesting that both artists who produced their work on computer are women, and both used it to surreal effects. Everything in large, colorful collaged computer graphics by Elizabeth S-K Heil - from shapes to color, portraits to pyramids, letters to brush strokes - is reduced to the jumped edged characteristic of computer-generated imagery.
Anna Fariello's delicate, digitized photo has the convincing authority of understatement, repetition and mechanical reproduction. In each phase of the serial image, a full moon is hand-held and hand-colored. These small choices insist on the artist's individuality in a universally mechanized age.
In "Art of Women" by M. Overton-Davidson, photographic reproductions of women in paintings and sculpture are printed on small glass panels suspended in a wooden frame. Images of women throughout history and art history - among them Nefertiti, Theodora, Madonna (with child), the three graces, Venus De Milo, and Winged Victory - are uniformly miniturized and strung like beads. The work's style, subject matter and purposely obscured title (which hides as much as it states), as well as the artist's hyphenated and initialized name, convince me that this artist, too, is a woman.
A nude female torso by Eileen McCaul is frontal, photographic and, as straightforward as it is, slightly disconcerting. Lucy Hazlegrove repeats an iconic female nude in several etchings enhanced with light-catching beads that shimmer across the room.
Shawn Murray's large reproduction proof of "Free S.A.," printed on kraft paper and enhanced with pastel, shows a silent, harrowing scream.
(The show runs through May 31 at the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts in Center in the Square, is open Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.; Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.)
by CNB