THE MAGIC OF REALISM
ARC Salon show
When Gary Haynes, owner of Haynes Galleries in Franklin, Tennessee, was looking through the 2019 Art Renewal Center Salon entries for an exhibition at his gallery, his goal was to select pieces that were more than just technically sound. “I was looking for works with imagination, with a different twist and a strong narrative,” he says. “I was looking for that combination of extra ‘somethings’ that pushed them above and beyond. The combination of all of this creates magic.”
The paintings he chose for the show, The Magic of Realism, do just that, he says. In all, there will be around 34 works on view, with pieces from Lucas Bononi, Anastasia Firenze, Jonathan Hodge, Mark Heine, Mark Larson, Ron Hicks, Lucia Heffernan, Bryony Bensly and Sookyi Lee.
Writing is an important part of Heine’s artistic process, as it sparks a vision for the painting and the painting in turn brings direction for the writing. Envoy, like the 75 other works in his Sirens series, is a visualization of a moment from his forthcoming books. The first book, aptly titled Sirens, “is fiction framed by magical realism,” he says. “Intended for young adults, the story is a contemporary reinterpretation of the femmes fatales made famous in Homer’s Odyssey, and it examines our ambiguous and destructive relationship with our environment.”
Envoy shows his character Aerica “still discovering the extent of her newfound and extraordinary abilities,” Heine explains. “Communication with the Orphan land creatures is possible. But as she will discover, not all of the Orphans have honest intentions. This envoy, the Raven, has a well-earned reputation in Coast Salish mythology. He is known as the trickster.”
Bensly’s artwork, too, has a connection with the environment. Of her painting, Seraphim, she shares, “Amazing inventions, and the growing movement, to protect our planet and its resources are the inspiration behind this piece. It is a prayer: that unforeseen forces will aid us, and mountains will move, in the quest to right our wrongs.”
In his painting Aptekareva, Bononi combines nature and the figure by presenting a woman surrounded by flowers. “The emotional quality of this painting was liberated from an external creative impulse to paint from a low-resolution image taken during the time of a video call,” he says. “Engulfed in the works of Mikhail Vrubel, I was driven with the sensation of crowning the muse with expressive flowers and painting an informal portrait both in format and in placement.”
Hodge’s piece for the exhibition, Katrina, draws on personal experience. “The inspiration for Katrina was both the 2005 hurricane that devastated my hometown of New Orleans, as well as Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa,” he says. “I tried to depict not only traumatized flood survivors, but the triumph of the human spirit in the face of great adversity.”
The Magic of Realism will be on view October 10 through November 30.