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Current Exhibitions Future Exhibitions Back to Exhibitions ) ) Night and Day, 2000, acrylic and gouache on paper, 22 ¾ x 29 inches (#592), by Danny Williams ) Installation shot from the exhibition ) Installation shot from the exhibition, featuring How, by Danny Williams |
 Lynn Curtis and Danny Williams: Dialogues in Contemporary Art May 25–July 28, 2002  Lode, 2000, oil on canvas, 28 x 26 inches, by Lynn Curtis Lynn Curtis and Danny Williams: Dialogues in Contemporary Art opened Saturday, May 25 and continued through Sunday, July 28. The exhibition focused on recent works by these two artists, each with a Texas connection. The works were presented with a view to engage the artists as well as the viewers in dialogues on contemporary art. Lynn Curtis was an Assistant Professor of Art at Southern Methodist University from 1991 to 1998. Now an Assistant Professor of Art at Providence College in Rhode Island, she has pursued "painting about painting" in oil. In the abstract art she produces, this concern materializes in the intimate and concrete connection that links the artist, the brush, and the painted surface. It is the experiment in the immediacy of the painterly gesture over an extended duration, in the way that forms and colors are placed on canvas, that distinguishes this artist's work. Of her work, Curtis states, "These are paintings and drawings that are vehicles for learning about myself and my surroundings, as well as markers on that trail. Each of them represents a point at which the activity of thinking in images reached the end of a 'sentence,' or a full stop. The work comes about through a process of finding, burying, and re-finding marks, colors, and shapes, growing through a series of destructions and additions until I recognize that it belongs to some resonant image or complex of feeling from my daily life, memory, or vicarious experience. The skin of the painting holds the visible traces of this history, and I value that evidence of the process without which the painting could not exist." The work of Dallas artist Danny Williams appears, at first glance, almost "decorative." His use of vibrant colors and repetition of design motifs are based upon fragments of images he remembers from his travels—Moroccan tiles, Arabic script, Indian miniatures, Oriental carpets. The viewers can see that Williams is fascinated by color and paint. His sense of color is sublime, his textures rich, and his way with pattern extraordinary. What appear to be orderly arrangements of repetitive shapes are actually full of interesting asymmetrical touches. His works are very cerebral, but they are by no means lacking in pleasure or humor, and there is a great deal of passion in them as well. At first glance, his paintings seem to be about patterns, shapes and designs, and, in this sense, very different from Curtis' abstract images. Yet when the two bodies of works are brought together in the same space and individual pieces placed side by side, they show surprising similarities. The two artists certainly share a similar attitude towards color and how painstakingly it may be applied to canvas. The objective of this exhibition is to show how apparently different works of art "speak" to each other in visual language. In the "dialogue" they enter into they reveal to us many things that were hidden in them. |