http://hedda-arts.blogspot.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
First Friday ArtWalk: Jacobs Gallery
Here is a link to a video of the Jacobs Gallery ArtWalk. When you reach Hedda's blog, click on the youtube link to #1 HEDDA'S ARTWORKS CHANNEL.
http://hedda-arts.blogspot.
http://hedda-arts.blogspot.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Review,The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon
The Register-Guard, November 14, 2013
At last month's opening reception for the current exhibit at Eugene's Jacobs Gallery, the question on everyone's mind was this: Who is Nancy Watterson Scharf?
The show, which runs through Nov. 23, is called "Three Sides of a Coin". It features paintings by two artists- Scharf and Bets Cole- and ceramics by a third, Grace Sheese.
Everyone who looks at paintings around here knows Cole, who lives in the country west of Eugene. She's a career landscape painter with a wide following. She's active in local arts circles. And she's been shown all over town .
And some people know Sheese, the ceramicist, even though she now lives in Illinois. She has shown her work in the past at the Jacobs and at DIVA and taught some ceramics courses here in 2005 and 2006.
But Scharf, who lives in Elkton, seems to have appeared out of nowhere with her sophisticated collection of big conceptual paintings that interweave images of wild birds with urban scenes. Somehow a mature, serious artist has been working right under our noses- and no one noticed.
That's for a reason. Scharf explained in an interview. "Life takes a lot of turns," she said.
Scharf, now 64, studied drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, planning all the while to become an artist. But, as she says, life intervened. She got married, started a family, moved to Sisters and got herself a job teaching art at a middle school.
It wasn't until 13 or 14 years ago that Scharf was able to take the time to start making her own art again on a steady basis. After cutting back her teaching to part time, she started putting in regular studio hours, painting every day, and soon started showing her work locally.
She's now retired from teaching and living in Elkton with her husband, a jeweler.
In those first years of her return to art, she experimented a lot. "There was no pressure to show or to sell," she said. "And so it just developed."
Working by herself, without a teacher, she was able to find a direction she wanted to take with her painting and pursue it.
"Now I'm able to say what I want to say," Scharf said. "I know where I'm going. What I began doing was not like anyone else's work,. But I trusted it."
Her work, as seen at the Jacobs, is an interesting mix of conceptual art and good, well-grounded representational painting. The concept is straightforward: Before people showed up and began to cover the planet, nature reigned.
What if we visualize the natural past of some of our over-built places?
Thus, we see a painting such as Scharf's "Pilgrim's Progress," a big (30 by 60 inches)horizontal image that shows a line of eight tall, elegant sandhill cranes walking among the reeds of an Eastern Oregon marsh, their bright eyes alert. Superimposed on the cranes are nine people you might meet on the sidewalk of any contemporary city, dressed casually, checking their phones, drinking coffee in paper cups.
The cranes are painted in full color. The superimposed humans are drawn in outline, making them tend to disappear into the birdscape. The intersection of the two images is haunting and evocative, throwing conventional ideas of physical reality out of kilter. Do the people and the cranes exist in the same place? Are they in parallel universes? Are we looking and present and past?
As in the best conceptual art, the questions are not obvious and easy, but grow naturally out of the work.
Scharf is also interested in masks, those synthetic faces that separate and connect us. In a disturbing painting, "Getting By in Modern Times," a sidewalk balloon vendor makes an animal for a little girl in fairy wings. The vendor's face is obscured by a balloon mask, giving the man's figure a Stephen King sort of creepiness. Creepier still, salmon swim up the street, and a single crane stands by, watching mournfully over the entire absurd scene.
With landscapes from around the West by Cole and small ceramic pieces by Sheese, this is a show well worth seeing.
Organic Vision
By Bob KeeferAt last month's opening reception for the current exhibit at Eugene's Jacobs Gallery, the question on everyone's mind was this: Who is Nancy Watterson Scharf?
The show, which runs through Nov. 23, is called "Three Sides of a Coin". It features paintings by two artists- Scharf and Bets Cole- and ceramics by a third, Grace Sheese.
Everyone who looks at paintings around here knows Cole, who lives in the country west of Eugene. She's a career landscape painter with a wide following. She's active in local arts circles. And she's been shown all over town .
And some people know Sheese, the ceramicist, even though she now lives in Illinois. She has shown her work in the past at the Jacobs and at DIVA and taught some ceramics courses here in 2005 and 2006.
But Scharf, who lives in Elkton, seems to have appeared out of nowhere with her sophisticated collection of big conceptual paintings that interweave images of wild birds with urban scenes. Somehow a mature, serious artist has been working right under our noses- and no one noticed.
That's for a reason. Scharf explained in an interview. "Life takes a lot of turns," she said.
Scharf, now 64, studied drawing and painting at the University of Oregon, planning all the while to become an artist. But, as she says, life intervened. She got married, started a family, moved to Sisters and got herself a job teaching art at a middle school.
It wasn't until 13 or 14 years ago that Scharf was able to take the time to start making her own art again on a steady basis. After cutting back her teaching to part time, she started putting in regular studio hours, painting every day, and soon started showing her work locally.
She's now retired from teaching and living in Elkton with her husband, a jeweler.
In those first years of her return to art, she experimented a lot. "There was no pressure to show or to sell," she said. "And so it just developed."
Working by herself, without a teacher, she was able to find a direction she wanted to take with her painting and pursue it.
"Now I'm able to say what I want to say," Scharf said. "I know where I'm going. What I began doing was not like anyone else's work,. But I trusted it."
Her work, as seen at the Jacobs, is an interesting mix of conceptual art and good, well-grounded representational painting. The concept is straightforward: Before people showed up and began to cover the planet, nature reigned.
What if we visualize the natural past of some of our over-built places?
Thus, we see a painting such as Scharf's "Pilgrim's Progress," a big (30 by 60 inches)horizontal image that shows a line of eight tall, elegant sandhill cranes walking among the reeds of an Eastern Oregon marsh, their bright eyes alert. Superimposed on the cranes are nine people you might meet on the sidewalk of any contemporary city, dressed casually, checking their phones, drinking coffee in paper cups.
The cranes are painted in full color. The superimposed humans are drawn in outline, making them tend to disappear into the birdscape. The intersection of the two images is haunting and evocative, throwing conventional ideas of physical reality out of kilter. Do the people and the cranes exist in the same place? Are they in parallel universes? Are we looking and present and past?
As in the best conceptual art, the questions are not obvious and easy, but grow naturally out of the work.
Scharf is also interested in masks, those synthetic faces that separate and connect us. In a disturbing painting, "Getting By in Modern Times," a sidewalk balloon vendor makes an animal for a little girl in fairy wings. The vendor's face is obscured by a balloon mask, giving the man's figure a Stephen King sort of creepiness. Creepier still, salmon swim up the street, and a single crane stands by, watching mournfully over the entire absurd scene.
With landscapes from around the West by Cole and small ceramic pieces by Sheese, this is a show well worth seeing.
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