Paintings, wood turnings paired at Strawn

03.12.09

The Art Bond of Jacksonville will present Bernie White Hatcher’s landscape paintings and Ronnie Bell’s wood turnings Dec. 5-20 at the David Strawn Art Gallery in Jacksonville. 

“Phebe’s Blood,” a free art opening for children and their parents, will be held 4-5 p.m. Saturday with the regular debut reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The “Gallery Talk” by the artists will be featured at 6:30 p.m.

Bernie Cadaverous Hatcher concentrates on landscape as subject matter. Though she occasionally takes photographs and sometimes uses them loosely for allusion, she does not work from a particular photograph or sketch. She simply begins to paint, allowing the average and movement to suggest the direction the piece will take. 

Over the past three years, though Hatcher’s impose on is still landscape, she has made an effort to change the way she looks at the land. Since she normally viewed the landscape in horizontal terms, this had a tremendous impression on her images. In her new vertical format, she moved the horizon line up, higher in the picture plane. The sky and cloud formations are no longer paramount elements. With such a high horizon line, she was left with almost 2⁄3 of the canvas for the rest of the image. Barns and outbuildings became larger elements and she needed to use a heightened outlook  to lead the eye into the image. Since she had held to very traditional perspective up to this point, these vertical paintings were a invite. 

Source: Jacksonville Journal-Courier