Artbeat

Gallery's 20th year toasted with exhibit

Renee Williams’ acrylic painting Vision I is part of Gallery 26’s 20th anniver-sary show.
Renee Williams’ acrylic painting Vision I is part of Gallery 26’s 20th anniver-sary show.

What better way for a gallery to celebrate a birthday than with an art show?

Gallery 26, marking its 20th anniversary, has done just that with works by owner Renee Williams and gallery employee Daniel Broening, both accomplished artists.

Williams, who also has exhibited at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, has a wall packed with beautifully executed acrylic paintings and some stunning pencil drawings. Giclees also are available.

In her paintings, Williams taps into nature and our response to it with a series of portraits of women with fantasy, folklore and mythological elements and some psychological undertones. Her work explores possibilities ... what might happen, what relationships might develop through interaction with the natural world.

"There is a relationship, or a possibility of one, if we don't let expectations get in the way," she says.

Sounds serious, and some of it is, but much of the work is lighthearted and there are dashes of humor that catch the viewer by surprise. None more so than Shhhh, a portrait of a girl with her finger raised to her lips, as a couple of UFOs float over her head.

One of Williams' most beautiful works, the lush Vision I, has a girl in a headdress of vines and lighted candles facing the viewer, a hummingbird hovering above outstretched hands. It is evocative of a winter solstice goddess, perhaps a metaphor for Mother Earth. Vision II offers a different view of the same scene.

In Star Shirt, a modern young woman wears a T-shirt emblazoned with a star. But stars also radiate from within her. Williams' works sometimes evoke the spirit of Maxfield Parrish and have the occasional visual reference (particularly her use of bubbles) of Parrish and art nouveau.

Broening offers digital and graphite drawings.

Prima Materia (Before the Storm) is an impressive nine-panel installation of layered digital drawings. The charged patterns and textures clearly reflect a physical and emotional turbulence that precedes the storm that brings release. The large-scale work is available, as are single panels of the work and a three-panel set.

His delicate but fluid and energetic graphite pieces suggest plant and animal forms.

Daniel Broening and Renee Williams, through Oct. 24, Gallery 26, 2601 Kavanaugh Blvd., Suite 1, Little Rock. Hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Info: (501) 664-8996, gallery26.com

POWER OF THREE

It is always a pleasure to see the refined sculpture of Michael Warrick, this time as part of a three-artist show at Boswell Mourot Fine Art.

Warrick, professor of sculpture at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has works in marble and wood at the gallery. Seed #20, cherry wood on a marble base, is especially organic. The wood grain adds a depth and warmth to this work, which in its bird-like form, feels evocative of Inuit sculpture.

Seed #19, a vertical work in marble, radiates motion and potency. Warrick, whose works are in many private and public collections, is a singular talent of vision and superior craftsmanship.

Jason McCann's mixed media paintings skillfully use light, line and shadow in his loosely painted work. Night at the Delta, set in the Arkansas Arts Center, is especially effective. He and his father, Dennis, had work in the recent Delta Exhibition there.

McCann's Rooftop Mushrooms is especially strong in its depiction of the rounded and printed caps on chimneys and exhaust pipes above building roofs.

And finally, Elizabeth Weber is showing some fine work on paper. The artist, who is known for large meditative abstract expressionist works inspired by her spiritual journey, is working in a smaller format. The tightly focused new work is no less compelling, as Weber's mystical visions radiate a magnetic power imbued with the ache and passion of the search for fulfillment.

Her heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul conversations, influenced by the color philosophy of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and the Sufi poet Rumi, also are emotional/spiritual mirrors that invite reflection.

Elizabeth Weber, Jason McCann, Michael Warrick, through Oct. 24, Boswell Mourot Fine Art, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd., Little Rock. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. Info: (501) 664-0030, boswellmourot.com.

Email:

ewidner@arkansasonline.com

Style on 10/13/2015

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