Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Artists employ bright hues to tell vastly divergent tales
The palettes of painters Elizabeth Weber and Keith Runkle are quite compatible, making their joint exhibition at Little Rock’s Boswell Mourot Fine Art especially appealing.
On the surface, both create beautiful canvases. But much more is revealed upon closer examination. Their exhibition, “Myths and Mysteries,” which hangs through Saturday, is aptly titled.
Both use bright colors, often in similar hues. Each uses color skillfully, but with a different purpose in mind.
Weber uses color and composition to invite introspection. She is an abstract artist whose work is intuitive, at times seemingly improvisational. Her color relationships and layers, at their best, are maps of the psyche: a spiritual autobiography. She is inspired by the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and Sufi poets Rumi and Hafiz, among others, and, especially, her own spiritual journey. She often
writes prose or poetry about her experiences that is posted alongside her paintings, giving insight into her creative process.
Runkle’s use of color is disarming. The beauty of his execution of classic Renaissance forms, to which he adds humor and contemporary references, makes his surrealistic works magnetic. Once drawn in, a viewer begins to see what is often a multitude of pop cultural references in his works of oil on linen and oil on canvas.
In her new work, Weber has embraced more texture, brighter colors and hints of representational forms. At
Wood’s Edge offers a peaceful, magical sanctuary at first, but it also may pose an emotional challenge as it calls us into the woods. What will we find? Are we safe? The turquoise trunks and green foliage of the forest could be a metaphor for the unknown as we stand on the familiar, textured reddish and yellow ground at the wood’s edge and our own.
Vision Quest, a desert-style mystical landscape, is a dreamscape of possibilities. Ancestral Cry reverberates with spiral-like motion and texture. Weber taps childhood memories of finding comfort among the trees in Finding Sanctuary in the Lichen and Finding Comfort in the Loam.
Runkle is especially powerful
on two large oil-on-linen works — The Ladies of Sandy Hook and The Lads of Sandy Hook. The diptych’s classic Renaissance home is riddled with bullet holes. In both, there are bowling pins with bullet holes, representing each of 20 children killed by a gunman in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. On the walls are painted pistols and AK-47s. Framed pictures of apples (with bullet holes) hang askew, representing the six adult staff members who were shot.
Each painting has a child in silhouette, a target painted over the form. And the message comes home in the form of subtitles: in Ladies, “The Erythraean Sibyl points toward the future to help us process the past”; and on
Lads, “The prophet Ezekiel reasons with the past to urge change in our present.”
Sticks, Stones … And There Are No Bones About It shows a Renaissance-style man being tormented by others and a tennis shoe-clad angel. It is rooted in his childhood experience of being picked on in school.
But it’s not all serious. Humor and sly pop culture references abound: She’s So Koi, in particular, in which a woman holds a koi aloft, and Ice Frogging, a play on ice fishing with a Jerry Garcia-like figure using grasshoppers for bait.
“Myths and Mysteries,” new work by Elizabeth Weber and Keith Runkle, through Saturday. Boswell Mourot Fine Art, 5815 Kavanaugh Blvd., Little Rock. Hours: 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. Info: (501) 664-0030.
HARRINGTONS’ AWARD
Artists and art educators Neal and Tammy Harrington have been named winners of the Beaux Arts Academy Award as Visual Artists of the Year by the River Valley Arts Center in Russellville. Tammy Harrington is professor of art at the University of the Ozarks; Neal Harrington is professor of art at Arkansas Tech University.
“It’s very cool, it was a real surprise,” Neal Harrington says.
The award is given to encourage excellence in art and to recognize artists in the Arkansas River Valley.
Neal Harrington won the Delta Award at the Arkansas Arts Center’s “Delta Exhibition” in 2013 and 2015.
The Harringtons have opened a joint exhibition titled “Twenty” at the Argenta branch of the William F. Laman Library, 420 Main St., North Little Rock. The show’s title celebrates the couple’s 20th anniversary. It hangs through May 13. For information, call (501) 687-1061. Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday.
Tammy Harrington is showing prints and her exquisite cut-paper works, while Neal Harrington’s pieces are drawings in bamboo brush, charcoal reduction and conte crayon.