‘Discovery’ takes viewers to many destinations
“A Journey of Discovery” is an apt title for a show that takes us to many destinations, using a wide variety of media.
The exhibit by Katherine LiontasWarren is in Norick Art Center at Oklahoma City University.
Expansive, yet focused, the show offers a grand tour of work by the longtime art professor at Cameron University in Lawton.
Watercolor washes give an expressive quality to her landscapes of “Quanah Parker Creek” and “Lake Lawtonka After the Storms.”
Even more moody and atmospheric are her portrayals of vague tree shapes in “The Sounds of Night,” and the muted hues of an “Evening Fog.”
More controlled, yet evocative, are a graphite drawing of trees on a bright “East Texas Morning” and a charcoal of “Winter Trees,” casting shadows on snow.
It is when she links nature and its creatures with human concerns, however, that she does some of her most memorable work.
In an oil, “Grieve for Our Blindness,” a sunlit, standing woman seems to envy the farsightedness of an owl, glaring at us from dripping darkness.
Three hawks, flying frantically in front of a giant tornado funnel, descending from orange storm clouds, offer us a “Tumultuous Prophesy” in a large pastel.
In a stone lithograph, a tornado in reverse, coming out of distant clouds or hills, sucks the roof off a birdhouse, as its two avian occupants plan their “Migration.”
Family stability also seems threatened in her large pastels of a bird on a roof, making “A Regional Search,” and of multicolored birdhouses flying through the air.
The almost ghostly faces of young people — contemporary or ancient — appear on classical Greek vases, emerging from dripping backgrounds, in many works from her “Vessel” series.
Having a strong, ghostly presence, too, are the head and shoulders of what appears to be an American Indian man, casting a large dark shadow, in her pastel
ART REVIEW
‘A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY’
Where:
Norick Art Center at Oklahoma City University, 1601 N Blackwelder Ave.
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, through Oct. 7.
6 to 8:30 p.m. Friday, Nona Jean Hulsey Gallery at the Norick Art Center.
edu.
208-5252 or www.okcu. portrait of “Randy.”
Excellent smaller works include a sepia-hued oil of the silhouette of “Gloss Mountain” and an oil of a rushing waterfall, “After the Rain in Medicine Park.”
A state resident since 1984, whose work has been in more than 400 shows worldwide, Liontas-Warren won a Governor’s Art and Education Award in 2014.
Her OCU show is highly recommended.