Hello friends,
Your local artist, former art professor, and occasional house painter is here to review four newly opened visual art exhibitions in Gettysburg.
September, the official start of gallery season in New York, has also graced Gettysburg with some fantastic shows.
The Adams County Arts Council is hosting three solo exhibitions. In the Reception Hall, we find landscape photos by Loy Elliot, mostly shown in wide-angle, sometimes panoramic, compositions. Elliot clearly has a passion for deep space and horizontal orientation, and these strategies work well for capturing his vast natural subjects like canyons and forests.
Other pieces depicted smaller subjects. In the photo East Berlin Playground, for example, I found an eerie David Lynchian beauty in the unpopulated equipment. Contrast that to two other misty scenes, Pike’s Peak State Park Iowa I & II, where Elliot’s wide-angle work successfully highlights the park’s majestic and unbound beauty.
In the Studio Gallery are paintings by Aaron Ulish. Ulish is a self-taught palette knife artist who started painting by watching Bob Ross.
Some of the earlier pieces are traditional in content – for instance, evening treelined avenues with reflections of streetlamps wet pavement. Such paintings highlight well what a palette knife can do, and Ulish mentioned to me that he took considerable inspiration from other artists in creating those pieces while learning his knife technique.
What I found particularly new is everything he has painted since then — work that creates a colorfully alive and even psychedelic world. If anyone from the Gettysburg Police Department is reading this, please know that I do not take illegal psychotropic substances, but now I might want to. And you can blame Aaron Ulish for that.
Notable canvases depict Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater – a house and museum in Mill Run, PA — from an almost intimidatingly bold angle, a resting lighthouse illuminated by glowing sunlight, and a sky resembling pastel cake icing that appears to be blowing a golfer into correct swinging form.
My favorite is Harvest, which, although it depicts a standard local scene of apple trees and a cylindrical haybale, is rendered to look like a dream with intense one-point perspective and a dramatic dark sky.
In the back Gallery is the “goodbye” show for beloved local ceramicist and pottery teacher, Jack Handshaw. Our friend isn’t going anywhere. He just won’t be teaching anymore, which will offer him more time to create the vessels we love.
But did you know (I didn’t) that Jack also paints watercolors and takes black and white photos? Wines and Cordials, music to my ears, is a watercolor depicting drinking vessels, but these are not just a few sparse Morandi-esque cups. The glasses fill the picture plane as if we were looking at a platform crowded with them. If you’ve ever taken a pottery class, you have experienced shelves covered in bowls, cups, and other vessels waiting to be fired. What a perfect painting to include in a pottery instructor’s semi-retirement exhibition! Congratulations, Jack!
Chris Lauer, artist and founder of Arts and Community Non-profit Waldos & Company, is finally exhibiting his own work in the space. (Full discretion – I’m friends with Chris and a member of Waldo’s board of directors – but I can assure you that my integrity as an art critic is rock solid)
Lauer has created dozens of depictions of star-shaped mylar balloons. Some are ceramic vases, most are ceramic wall hangings, and one is a large drawing. They are delightful, and his artist statement suggests that this was the intention: To give everyone a break from a world that has been “a lot.”
If I were to purchase three stars (and you get a deal if you buy three), I would hang them asymmetrically to add to that sense of play and whimsy. At Waldo’s, they are hung in a standard formation, which brings to my mind the stars of the American flag. I do not think this was Chris’s intention, but balloon stars lined up in tactical orders leave me pondering whether our democracy may float away.
I love it when a critique of the king is hidden in a fairy tale.
Sarah Jacobs is a contemporary maximalist and surrealist artist. Her canvas work is represented in NYC by Fremin Gallery and in Pittsburgh by Zynka Gallery. She also paints murals. Jacobs was raised in Littlestown and educated in Art History at Gettysburg College. She received her MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore in 2010. There she studied under Joyce Kozloff, founding member of the Pattern & Decoration and Feminist art movements of the 1970’s. Jacobs moved back to the USA in 2014 after three years living in London and Bristol, UK where she became a naturalized British citizen. She now lives and paints in Gettysburg. Besides making and studying art, she enjoys fine wine, reading novels and philosophy, long walks in the battlefield, and being with her friends.