Thursday, Nov. 24, 2011

Get out on Black Friday, not to shop, but to see some art exhibits

Music ties together art exhibits

Courtesy image

"The Fading 8" by Brian Rutenberg is one of the pieces on display at the Myrtle Beach art museum.

 

More information

If you go

What | Three art exhibits

Where | Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum, 3100 S. Ocean Blvd., Myrtle Beach

When | 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and 1-4 p.m. Sundays

How much | Free, but donations welcome

Information | 238-2510 or www.myrtlebeachartmuseum.org

Also | Bobbie Lawson, a retired art history professor from Coastal Carolina University, will give a docent tour of “Brimming Tide” at 2 p.m. Dec. 4

Rhythms play out in three ways in a trio of exhibits by and about South Carolina artists through year’s end at Myrtle Beach’s art museum.

“We’ve presented three exhibits in the past,” said Patricia Goodwin, executive director of the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum, “but what sets these apart – in my opinion – is the energy created in each exhibit and by each exhibit. And, of course, the common thread connecting all three is music.”

The Myrtle Beach-native and subject of “Brimming Tide: Paintings and Drawings by Brian Rutenberg,” a percussionist, cherished music by the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.

“Story, Song and Image: A Collaborative Project of Paintings and Music by Glen Miller and John Fowler,” honors S.C. roots music and its players.

The featured artist in “The Lonely Shadow: Silhouette Art by Clay Rice” spent several years in Nashville, Tenn., in the music business and has cut his own groove with his words and images.

“So all three have energy and all three have rhythm,” Goodwin said.

No particular order exists for seeing the exhibits, but a visit last week followed what Goodwin suggested as the “take it from the top” axiom, starting upstairs for roots rhythms, then descending to the main floor galleries for the richly colored Rutenberg wall-size abstracts and Rice’s playful shadows.

‘Story, Song and Image’

In “Story, Song and Image,” Fowler and Miller – storyteller/musician and artist/professor – partnered by highlighting 10 music artists and groups from various pockets across the Palmetto State and sharing their backgrounds and traditions through paintings and drawings.

As a CD plays in the background, including selections by all the people portrayed on canvas, almost all the paintings and corresponding sketches show the subject in action sharing their artistic love in their everyday lives, with food and other tokens making up the setting.

The painting of Keepers of the Word, from St. George, northwest of Charleston, honors American Indian heritage, showing 11 people sitting around a drum, with almost everyone holding a mallett ready to strike a beat, except for a child looking aside.

See Nick Hallman of Pickens, just west of Greenville, clad in a blue shirt and jeans, sitting on a chair cushion with his feet crossed and playing “old-time music” on the fiddle, captivating two small dogs in the room. A pooch also sits beside “Blues Doctor” Drink Small of Columbia, with guitar in hand.

With a look at Hope Nunnery, a native of Sumter County, the viewer might wonder what she feels while strumming country gospel on guitar with her eyes closed, perhaps in a tavern, as smoke from a patron’s cigarette wafts by.

An introductory wall card also shows the historic sequence of music genres established across South Carolina, such as how Scottish and Irish settlers brought to the Piedmont fiddle tunes for jigs, reeds or ballads, and that fiddles later emerged in swing, country and as part of a “new sound” with the banjo, guitar and mandolin in bluegrass.

‘Brimming Tide’

Leading a docent tour in “Brimming Tide,” Bobbie Lawson, a retired art history professor from Coastal Carolina University, voiced her admiration for the layers of paint Rutenberg uses in his works, up to 3 inches thick in places.

“I like linear things,” she said. “It makes you start paying attention.”

Lawson called Rutenberg’s “lush” colors an influence he reaped from the “Italian masters” and Celtic artists. She lauded his use of “complementary colors,” such as red with orange and gold, contrasted against blues.

“Anytime you work on this scale, it’s hard to ignore it,” Lawson said.

Stopping by “Pavillion”, an oil on linen more than 5 feet tall and 131/2 feet wide, Lawson asked the tour takers what they liked best.

The observations included its textures, softness and colorful array. Lawson brought up one critique that stuck with her, about how the painting contained a foreground and background, but no middle ground.

She also had everyone peruse one gallery wing solely with drawings by Rutenberg, such as “Farmer,” with its cross-hatching and shadowing used to frame the subject’s facial expression. Showing these “pencil on paper” works helps debunk the cliché that abstract artists “don’t know how to draw.”

Abstract art overall, Lawson said, represents “something whose motif was taken from nature,” and that viewers can “see something different every time” in such works.

‘The Lonely Shadow’

Reach Rice’s “The Lonely Shadow” by going through the “Brimming Tide” gallery, and it starts with the first work on the right following a story line with detailed, cut-out silhouette illustrations going counterclockwise through a room and hall.

The journey begins with a lonely shadow looking for a child to befriend: “I have no you. You have no me. You and me: We have no we.”

Walk with the shadow as he enters a forest and dines with deer, and later drinks with a drake and stretches out long and slender with a snake. Encountering an owl, the shadow learns, “You must go where the children are.”

Meeting a boy at a playground, who notes that shadows come out to play only late in the day, this shadow finds his match.

Continue with the series of illustrations lining two walls of a hall, and see the pair kick a ball, go down a slide, take a wagon ride and climb a tree.

Rice, who has clipped more than 900,000 silhouettes in making a career of storytelling, brings closure to this shadow who started this adventure solo, with the mutually pleasing result that night “as the big clock went gong” at the boy’s bedtime:

“I have you. You have me. Together, we will always be.”

Reach STEVE PALISIN at 444-1764.