CAL holiday show supplies works of beauty for the art lover

In this edition of the Columbia Art League’s annual “Give a Gift of Art” holiday exhibit, the oils have it.

Each winner of the member’s open show were oil painters: JD King, CAL newcomer Kate Klingensmith and Jane Mudd placed first, second and third, respectively. All of the works of art — winners, honorable mentions, and others — are for sale during the holiday season, offering another chance to patrons to purchase art for their friends and loved ones.

Not only did oil paints take the spoils in this exhibit, but nature in its various forms is prominent as well. Landscapes depicting all seasons dominate the gallery walls; Executive Director Diana Moxon and her colleagues even began grouping some seasons together for presentation. An inner wall shows black-and-white images fringed by winter scenes, and the art on the wall facing the front windows collectively echo the last fiery vestiges of autumn colors. Tucked in right by the window is a fall-weather tribute to The Blue Note by Stephanie Jenkins. The artist represented the venerated music venue standing stately and surrounded by a thick glory of fall leaves from the trees lining the sidewalk on Ninth Street.

King’s first-place painting, “Hey Mack,” also testifies to the burning brilliance of fall colors; an imposing classic Mack truck, nearly the same bold colors as the landscape surrounding it, fills most of the canvas as leaves drop over and around it. The truck’s bumper lackadaisically reads, “Move It On Over.” King painted from an old photograph he had taken of a truck on the side of the road three miles west of Ashland, he said in an email. The massive tree behind the truck had begun to grow into the Mack’s back bed. Old trucks, he said, “embody a male aesthetic that has to do with responsibility, tradition and purpose, and they are also kind of sad in an almost romantic way. It’s kind of like a photo of that beloved old dog on the front porch. Seen a lot and wishes he could tell you about it.”

Jane Mudd, who earned third place, switches seasons with “Spring Thaw,” an oil-based kaleidoscope of color all worked into a slightly abstract, fluid rendering of a creek thawing into a slight waterfall. A bare tree is just budding in the foreground; the entire spectrum of smears fit together to create a beautifully wrought whole.

The storm dramas of summer have a presence as well: George Tutt’s large painting in the back corner, “Storm’s Comin’,” depicts a ramshackle shed in the foreground, painted in boldly opaque watercolors. A lamp-lit farmhouse rests in the background, reflecting gold glow into a small pond. Over the hills in the background, clouds rise, and a sky deepens purple with oncoming rain. Eric Seat’s painting, “After the Storm,” reflects the aftermath of such a gathering rain: A wall of dark clouds disperses and breaks into fingers of sunset-thrashed orange.

Nature is reflected in surreal and hyper-idealized forms in addition to the more straightforward landscapes. Amy Jerke’s photograph “Dream Worlds,” shows a stunning close-up of a dewdrop-studded feather, almost a Mother-Nature-forged Swarovski. Across from the photograph, Megan Henley, a Rock Bridge High School student who won this show’s Emerging Artist award, created a checkered paper-and-ink representation of a fish with a bulbous eye and a mass of stylized scales. Kate Passis, who often creates artistic studies in polymer clay, has returned with a small jewel of a mosaic that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a reflection of a tree line under moonlight; leaves drop everywhere and land on the “water” portrayed as less vivid, more grayish stones. Even the moon, at the top left of the mosaic, has a water reflection in the bottom half of the mosaic, a slightly duller but still glistening bit of pearl.

Tending toward the mammalian side of nature is Kate Klingensmith’s second-place work, “Pinto in the Sun,” a painting showing the muscular sunlit flank of a pinto horse. Klingensmith, who moved to Moberly from Colorado this year, frequently used to drive past a farm named The Paint Factory that bred painted horses.

Klingensmith finally called the owners and asked if she could photograph their horses, she said in an email. “Pinto in the Sun” was one of the horses she photographed. “In addition to thinking about the overall design of the image,” she said, “I photograph what it is that fascinates me about a horse at that moment. … For ‘Pinto in the Sun,’ it was his mane and back, with the sun on him and a slight breeze in the air.” The artist, who paints horses on commission, also has expressed other natural themes in big-sky landscapes and highway scenes from Montana.

Near the front of the gallery is a collection of sculptures and functional objects that nearly look as if they had been plotted together or fashioned from the same channels of imagination. Ahmed Ithman, who is new to CAL, has created the self-describing “White & Green Vase,” a porcelain work with a sandy-colored rim and clouds of green and turquoise merging with creamy colors around the basin. Mike Seat and Ray Almeida also have contributed similarly colored functional sculptures; the three play together well while retaining their own artistic distinctions. Elsewhere in the sculptural offerings is a fluid, twisting lamp sculpture made out of “cone 6” translucent porcelain, sculpted by Fadra Hepner sculpted. The effect is almost that of a wizard’s hat. To create small divots reminiscent of constellations, which let light to the outside of the sculpture, Hepner rolled grains of rice into the porcelain, Moxon said. Each grain of rice burned up when she fired the sculpture, leaving the tiny dents behind.