Visions and Discoveries

Feature Exhibition:

Visions

(September 10-October 24)

A collection of works by three artists, including paintings by Phil Parsons, photography by Bill Storm, and ink drawings by Barbara Stout is the featured exhibition heralding the start of the new season at Delavan Art Gallery. Visions opens September 10 with a public reception that night from 5:00-8:00 PM.

Phil Parsons, a graduate of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, is a nationally published decorative artist who works with interior designers and clients throughout New York. His current collection of paintings at Delavan, however, points to pride of his families' roots in Syracuse and appreciation for the city's rural surroundings of small towns, farms and countryside fields. Under the title, Roadside, Parsons says, "I wanted to capture those ragged woods, matted fields and old homesteads." The works represent over two years of work, altered in his perception of viewing the subject matter following the passing of a family member. He says, "In death, everything seems fleeting. I needed a record, a reminder for my children and myself. This is where we live." While Parsons' pieces are painted in a realistic style, he explains, "I have felt free to change the landscape, repaint barns, and invent skies to reflect my feelings."

Bill Storm, influenced from his early professional background as musician, recording engineer and producer, says his show titled, Primeval, is the outgrowth of a lifetime fascination for expressing emotions and ideas through artistic media, be it sound or visual, that "makes me want to stop and look or listen." Storm says he discovered his love for fine art photography while at Syracuse University where his musical experience earned him positions both as a Director of the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive and as an instructor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He says that his good fortune of having worked with a host of noted recording artists in his previous career, along with appreciation for works by masters studied in his new endeavor, helped him to 'see in single images the wonderful sensory impact associated with great musicians playing on great recordings.' Thus his fine art approach and straightforward goal of "creating images that trigger imagination."

Gods, Beasts, and Mortals is the title Barbara Stout says best describes her ink drawings included in Visions, citing that only a few are clearly or vaguely human, and the rest, animal or beast-like or in the deity category. The artist, whose strongest influences come from primitive art, signs and symbols from numerous cultures, as well as from psychology and social relationships, says that in her creations she is looking for a resonance with the raw experience of love... "its vulnerability, openness, heightened awareness, abandon and beauty." She feels that these explorations "have their own rules that translate a poetic truth rather than a literal rendering." Thus Stout describes her paintings as becoming like a jazz improvisation, exposing the history and beauty of freedom where in her painted worlds "a beast can buy a car, Jesus can leave the high and mighty, wings can appear in unexpected places, and somewhere a new set of wings are sprouting.'

Wild Card Exhibition:
Discoveries
(September 10-October 3)
Encaustics by Tanya Kirouac

Reaching beyond US borders, Delavan Art Gallery is pleased to present Discoveries, an exhibition that celebrates the engaging talents of an encaustic painter who hails from Toronto, Ontario. The artist describes the term encaustic, derived from the Greek word 'enkaustikos' meaning "to heat" or "to burn," as a technique that uses wax in a process involving heat to apply the medium and secure it. Composed of beeswax or microcrystalline wax, damar resin and pigments, the term is often used to describe both the paint itself and the method for using it.

In her artist statement, Kirouac explains, "I am an encaustic painter, deeply rooted in the visual language of landscapes and the natural world. Similar to the way nature builds up and washes away what it creates, I apply and remove layers of wax. Possibilities, which had yet to be discovered rise and make themselves apparent. This process allows me to develop complex images in relief." She continues, "Encaustic has an inherent opacity. This quality creates transparency, which mirrors the fragility of our world. These transparencies give the completed works an almost dreamlike finish - a reminder of the possibility that the objects of my inspiration can be fleeting and might one day exist only in my memory."