Norman art center hosts faculty show

NORMAN — A range of styles, media and content from abstract to realistic can be found in the Faculty Show at Firehouse Art Center, 444 S Flood, Norman.

The exhibit by teachers at the Norman community art center will be on display from Monday through July 20, with second Friday public receptions planned from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday and July 12.

A red-orange glow of sunlight, alternating with areas of shadow, suffuses the classic southwestern landscape being surveyed by an Indian rider in a superb oil by Carol Armstrong called “Mother Earth, Father Sky.”

A similar fiery light ignites the sky, getting stronger “Moment by Moment” over trees, a road and a farm building, while one can just make out the silhouettes of tepees beside a river, in two fine acrylics by Thomas Stotts.

More abstract but suggesting landscape features, either viewed directly or from overhead, is a large work by Douglas Shaw Elder, called “Totemic Relief IV,” in which polychrome plywood becomes the main medium.

Silvery gray, stormy, sculptural clouds seem to float over or be “Waiting at the Edge” of a dark brown precipice, in an almost equally eyegrabbing polychrome wood composition by Craig Swan.

Two small, untitled white alabaster sculptures on rusted steel cube stands by Bill Boettcher are more abstract than a truncated, brown alabaster, nearly neoclassic male “Torso,” shown on a block of red granite by the same artist.

There is something crazily appealing about three tiny, whimsically serendipitous “Spouted Bottles,” and two larger “Crack Pots” by Dan Harris, which look like they’ve been excavated from the ruins of an ancient city.

Serendipitous, too, are two white sheep, looking directly back at us, standing under a “Thunder Cloud” in the foreground of a dark but delightful acrylic landscape by Jane Lawson.

More conventional, but no less appealing, are an almost Morse Code-like platter of “Lines & Dots,” if not dots and dashes, by Joe Cox, and a “Tomato Red Casserole,” with green calligraphic decorations, by Florene Welcher.

Leafy vines seem to hang downward into a triangle of dendritic shale balanced on a silver branch with opal buds in a beautifully designed and crafted necklace called “My Backyard #4,” by Elyse Bogart.

Nature is celebrated in Carol Ann Danko’s closeup color photo of a “RedShouldered Hawk,” and in Beverly Herndon’s wellhandled ink-watercolor on rice paper study of a fishing boat sailing under the branches of “The Tree.”

Jenna Alyse Bryan leaves us to contemplate the visual conundrum of the “Infinite Entwinement” of stainless steel bands in one of her two sculptural contributions to the show.

The faculty exhibit is recommended viewing during the rest of its run at Firehouse.

Hours are from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

Call 329-4523 or visit the website at www. normanfirehouse.com for information.