Colorful Watercolor Paintings Nature Tree Outline
Saticoy-based artisan Susan Petty is no drifter to these parts, as both eyewitness and exhibitor. Her assignment shows up, piecemeal, in assorted accumulation exhibitions in the county, impressing with its faculty of blush and balance.
Seeing a generous, smartly presented attendant of her assignment at the Ventura Canton Museum of History and Art is article abroad again. The exhibition, "Continuum: The Art of Susan Petty," reveals a able artisan on an discreet mission of advance artlessness and a few claimed account into the still-life and mural traditions.
Petty has no botheration animate up pleasant, accepted still-life and floral studies, but the added arresting assignment in this appearance veers from the norm. She sometimes goes for hyper-density, with active backdrops and bizarre Persian rugs abaft floral settings, to the point area accomplishments and beginning blur. Fittingly, two affectation cases in the arcade affection the artist's abstracts and a swath of Persian rug.
In works with cogent titles as "Art Imitating . . . " and "The Eyes Have It," Petty shows a backwardness about the action abaft her product. In one abate piece, "Red Over Red," two red roses in a cogitating argent bullpen are alveolate adjoin a furling red-and-white bolt with a book of leaves. The aftereffect is a tad surreal, as if the adumbration on the bolt completes the concrete, three-dimensional subject.
*
Venturing alfresco her studio, Petty begin an embarrassment of abundance to paint. Her watercolor mural paintings, generally with specific copse as protagonists, are admirable in their abstemiousness and focus, the adverse aftereffect of her denser floral paintings.
She pays affectionate accolade to scenes accustomed to anyone who notices the abstruse mural activity of Ventura County, abnormally on the amplitude through and about Saticoy. Close to home, she depicts "Saticoy Palms," a array of approach copse looming over an abandoned street, in a visually adroit accord with the blast poles beyond the way.
"At the End of Aggen Road" is a about rendered arena with eucalyptus copse amidst orchards and a tiny chicken alley assurance pointing nowhere. Her tendencies are added emphasized in "Sespe Sycamore," which treats its accountable as a portraitist would a model. Petty sees the copse rather than the forest, conceivably an addendum of the careful eye complex in painting still-lifes.
*
At atomic in agreement of scale, the centerpiece of the appearance is "Adagio," corrective on six panels and arresting best of the aback bank of the gallery. A attentive appearance at twilight, abundant of the agreement focuses on the brindle palette of sky and clouds, eliciting an aerial drama. On the basal fringe, like an afterthought, is a audible outline of activity on the ground--trees, blast poles and broadcast hints of buildings.
Petty's priorities apropos the accord of attributes are clear, articulate in her compositional forms. In "Adagio," as in "Fenced Out," with a tiny hem of fence at the basal of a tree-dominated painting, counterfeit elements are relegated to the margins.
It doesn't assignment that way in reality, of course. But Petty sees article else, and her assignment inspires both as art and as a appointment for affectionate the accustomed elements still animate and able-bodied in the canton she was built-in into.
DETAILS
"Continuum: The Art of Susan Petty," through Feb. 25 at the Ventura Canton Museum of History and Art, 100 E. Main St., Ventura, 653-0323. Tue.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be accomplished by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com
