Her paintings are riffs on Constable’s portraits of the English aristocracy — like them, sumptuously dressed and posed in a romantic landscape and infused with an aura of wistfulness, as captured moments of fleeting beauty. Siegel’s confections also are obviously influenced by the French painters Fragonard, Boucher, and Watteau in their rosy palette and preoccupation with pleasure in a placid, Arcadian landscape. (Her oeuvre even includes an image of a bovine on a swing, a classic motif of the rococo.)
Regardless that her subjects bear the heads of long-faced cows and sheep, rather than smiling, rosy-cheeked young women or clean-shaven, bewigged gents, they seem to perfectly balance the qualities of levity and joy, domesticity and culture, reserve and expressiveness. The result is the consummation of a classical ideal of beauty, a fusion of nature and civilization — the twist being that these animals in their homely innocence suggest a kind of modest unself-consciousness that seems rare indeed in their human counterparts.
A language of transformation
Harvey’s grid of paintings on paper deploy deft, script-like lines in colored ink to construct a sign language that explores ideas of connection and metamorphosis. A series of deer heads with antlers are like stopped animations in which the scroll-like flourishes of antlers become decorative insignia; the heads take on human propensities, so that some resemble fools or cuckolds, identified by their branching head gear. Others are sphinx-like. The bottom row of images consist of a seated reindeer next to a tree, the branches of the tree obviously resonating with the antlers. Harvey, who is based inTroy, creates a system of binary forms (linear, branching matched with the circular head or closed figure) for a kind of folk language verging on the fantastic.
More animals are on display at the Storefront Gallery, located at 93 Broadway. Jean Fleming’s folk-style paintings of dogs look like the happiest canines on earth, trotting contentedly in landscapes of green fields and parks. The images are painted on plywood, cut crookedly to resemble an old board and incorporating a simple trompe l’oeil frame. The artist is raffling off a painting (tickets are $5) with the proceeds donated to the Kingston Point Dog Park.
Chris Gonyea’s former gallery, the Living Room, has had a second life as a pop-up gallery, and now Gonyea himself showed his soot drawings of woods at a one-day-only pop-up gallery, located in the former studio of artist Sarah Mecklem at 4 West Union St. Gonyea showed 90 mostly small-scaled drawings, which are made from soot, derived from holding the paper over an open flame. He developed the technique himself, which has been honed to an incredible fineness: some of the pieces resemble wood blocks, with the finely wrought tree twining tree forms superimposed on a tinted ground, while others have a photographic quality, in which the forms partially dissolve in foggy, whitish areas, like splotches of overexposure in an antique photo.
KMOCA is located at103 Abeel St.and is open Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. The Storefront Gallery, 93 Broadway, is open Saturdays from 1-6 p.m. and also by appointment.
