So, on December 1st I finally had the opportunity to attend my first artist lecture of the semester. It was called the Shape of Color, exhibiting paintings done by Carol Aronson-Shore. There were two collections being shown containing somewhere around 50+ paintings of Strawberry Banke (Portsmouth, NH) and Mohegan Island (Maine). About twenty people were present, the majority being an older audience who seemed to be familiar and enthusiastic about Mrs. Aronson-Shore's works.
The lecture was actually given by Kimberly Alexander, the curator on Strawberry Banke, which I thought was interesting and a little weird. I guess I assumed that the actual artist would lecture about her own works rather than having someone else lecture about their own interpretation. It was also weird since the artist was actually among the audience and was asked to speak about her own works in the end anyways. Mrs. Alexander focused on the Strawberry Banke series and presented some interesting points about the works and the techniques that the artist had used. One of the things she mentioned that was not something that I had thought of when first wandering around looking at the works was the artists' used of walls, boundaries and hard horizontals to control the perspective of the viewer. She mentioned that by doing this, the artist was constructing a view that she wanted you to see and then "step inside" the picture to try and see what was around the corner or be trapped and wonder "where do I go now?". I thought this was kind of interesting because I hadn't felt that or seen that when first observing the pictures. I had just assumed that that was the way that the village was set up with closely built buildings and a more formal layout since it is a historic village. But after having this pointed out to me, I could she what she meant.
Another point that Mrs. Alexander pointed out was the use of color and stripped down detail of the paintings. The artist used strong breaking lines to define shadow and light areas, which were then portray in solid colors (very saturated colors) with little shading or gradient of colors. The most buildings lacked detail as well. This was actually something that I didn't really like about the artist style. She was extremely precise, clean and accurate with her painting, which I appreciated since I know how difficult it is to accomplish that, but I was not very fond of how stripped down her work was. I didn't like the use of solid colors and minimal detail. I have a tendency to prefer more detail and tonal range in paintings that are more realistic. Especially in something that is so historic. I would like to have seen all the detail that is often found in buildings built "back then". If the paintings had been abstract then the lack of detail and use of solid colors would have been great. But that is just a personal opinion, the artist is very good at what she does and I can appreciate her take on the village.
The last thing that really stood out to me was when Mrs. Aronson-Shore spoke, she mentioned the understanding of art history and by painting something that had been around for a long time and had been part of another previous artists' work you are joining a continuum and adding your own piece to the story of that place. I thought that was a really cool perspective to being an artist.
Here is the link to the artist website: http://www.carolaronsonshore.com/index.html
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