Light in Space
Nature seen, literally or otherwise, by Loriann Signori, Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Anne Stine, and Gale Waller
Loriann Signori, “Winter Twilight” (Gallery B)
WORKING MOSTLY FROM MEMORY, Loriann Signori makes pictures that are both hazier and more intense than their inspirations. The suburban Maryland artist's fundamental subject is revealed by the title of her latest Gallery B show, "Light Is a Kind Of Generosity." Whether depicting forests or flower arrangements, Signori amplifies the ways sunlight flows, seeps, and pools, most often in the sky or sometimes across land or water.
While the artist calls these 20 pictures "paintings," there's just a single oil among them. The rest are pastels whose granular pigments, applied in as many as 50 layers, have been melted into each other with turpentine. Some of the details appear drawn, but the overall effect is fluid and painterly. The most obvious precedent for Signori's approach is the later style of J.M.W. Turner, whose dynamic oils pushed stormy seas and turbulent skies to the brink of abstraction.
Big skies are a feature of many of these pictures, including "Storm Lift," which is energized by gold flecks, and "Winter Twilight," whose blue expanses are warmed at their center by a distant sun. Diffused light glows through forests and clouds, notably the towering edifices of vapor that Signori's titles call "cathedrals." Manmade structures, dwarfed by their environs, occasionally appear in the artist's semi-abstract landscapes. But the master builder is nature.
Nine of these pastels are large, and evoke vastness. All of them are also, however, intimate. As the artist's style has turned mistier, it's become less concerned with conjuring depth and a sense of distance. Signori swaddles the eye in expressionist colors and dispersed radiance, placing the viewer as close as possible to the center of her remembered locations. It's a dazzling place to be.
Lois Dodd, “White House with Garden” (Gallery Neptune & Brown)
THE ROCKY MAINE COAST is among the subjects illustrated in Lois Dodd's "Mastering the Art of Direct Observation," a show of pencil-and-watercolor landscapes and still lifes at Gallery Neptune & Brown. The 96-year-old artist also takes a topographic approach to the reclining female nude in three pictures that highlight peach-colored flesh with patches of blue and violet shadow.
Pink is not just for skin in these rarely exhibited drawing-paintings, made between 1964 and 1980. (There's also a wispy ink drawing from 2011.) Some of the boulders that frame an ocean inlet are rosy, as is a house that's defined as much by soft color as hard outlining. There's an architectonic quality as well to "Large Leaves," a closeup study of foliage in which pinkish light plays on one of the pale green leaves. The simple subject yields an intricate arrangement of lines and hues, suggesting the complexity visible in all things -- if only they're examined carefully.
On the other side of the gallery are "Luminous Landscapes" by Wolf Kahn, Dodd's kindred spirit and near-neighbor. The German-born artist (1927-2020) summered for decades in Vermont, where he brought an abstractionist's brash sense of color to gentle landscapes.
These one-of-a-kind monotypes, made between 1987 and 2012, divide between horizontally and vertically focused compositions. The latter are defined by tree trunks that thrust almost the way from the bottom to the top of the pictures. Sideways swathes of red and magenta in such prints as "Outrageous Sunset" are the boldest element. But it's the jabbing gray and brown lines, distilling groves of trees into rudimentary strokes, that give the most notable pictures their appealing energy.
Anne Stine, "Love and Water Brought Back Her Strength" (Touchstone Gallery)
LOCAL RIVERS AND SWISS MOUNTAINS ARE THE SUBJECTS of -- or at least the inspirations for -- paintings by local artists Anne Stine and Gale Waller, exhibiting together at Touchstone Gallery. Stine's pictures are mixed-media semi-abstractions, with a chunky sculptural quality that reflects the way pigment and wax are combined. Waller's mountainscapes are much more literal, and in fact were influenced in part by the style of photorealist Richard Estes, who's known more for portraying glass and steel than ice and snow.
The title of Stine's show, "Call for Sweet Water," is from Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's goriest play. That may be more apt that it initially seems. Although her river views are mostly placid, Stine fuses her materials with a blowtorch, bringing a touch of fire to the blue-heavy compositions. The chunks of color that result from the process evoke rocky shores and craggy river beds, notably in vertically oriented pictures such as "Love and Water Brought Back Her Strength." While most of Stine's paintings glide above the river's surface, calmly observing the water and surroundings, the most commanding ones plunge the viewer into the scene.
Gale Waller, “Alaska Range 1” (Touchstone Gallery)
The blues can be even more overwhelming in Waller's "Ex Montibus Salus," whose oil-and-acrylic paintings depict azure skies whose hues are reflected in sweeping alpine snow banks below. (The artist's statement translates the Latin title phrase as "all good comes from the mountains"; a more literal rendering would be "health from mountains.") The pictures derive from photographs the artist made in Switzerland and Alaska, and reveal seemingly mighty peaks under environmental duress. The glaciers are retreating, and higher temperatures melt new holes in the snow packs. Waller's canvases capture fleeting sunlight as it plays upon seemingly impregnable rock, sometimes highlighting just the edge of a ridge. The mountains are as mutable as the sky, just on a different time scale.
Loriann Signori: Light Is a Kind Of Generosity
Through Dec. 1 at Gallery B, 7700 Wisconsin Ave. #E, Bethesda. bethesda.org/bethesda/gallery-b-exhibitions. 301-215-7990.
Lois Dodd: Mastering the Art of Direct Observation
Wolf Kahn: Luminous Landscapes
Through Nov. 30 at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW. galleryneptunebrown.com. 202-986-1200.
Anne Stine: Call for Sweet Water
Gale Waller: Ex Montibus Salus
Through Dec. 1 at Touchstone Gallery, 901 New York Ave. NW. touchstonegallery.com. 202-682-4125.