Imagine you're choosing actors for a movie, and you can cast only pieces of fruit in the lead roles. C'mon, bear with me. You want big names. You want box-office draw. So you have to pick someone who's visible and familiar. Maybe an apple, or an orange, or a banana (you can pull in the Curious George crowd). But is that fair to the humble pomegranate?
Fortunately, the pomegranate is getting its moment in the sun on the Peninsula. "Facets of Perception," a new exhibit at the Los Altos Hills Town Hall, features 18 artists' paintings. Each one has a different interpretation of the fruit, from realist to surrealist to abstract expressionist. The result has a lot of festive red and is surprisingly charming.
The show is the work of Artists Beyond Obvious, a group meeting in Los Altos every Thursday "for critique and coffee," member artist Karen Druker said. The flock grew out of a watercolor class they all took from Mike E. Bailey a few years ago through the UCSC Extension in Cupertino.
Bailey had them work with the same still-life set-up for 10 weeks, painting it over and over, emphasizing different art elements. "We'd really get into it! We'd dream of whatever was in our still life," Druker said. "What usually happened was a breakthrough about week 7 when we ran out of ideas; then we'd usually get really wild or go abstract."
Post-class, the artists kept meeting, and now they had experience looking at the same thing from many perspectives. For this exhibit, Los Altos Hills city curator Ethel Blank suggested the pomegranate, which Druker says has "a fascinating 5,000-year-old history of symbolism."
"The pomegranate is an appropriate symbol for a group of women artists as it symbolizes woman, womb, breasts and fertility, along with a lexicon of other symbolism," Druker said.
Pictured: Not from the exhibit, but a nifty snap of a pomegranate trio from loneangel at www.morgueFile.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment