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By
Kathleen Sloan
HERALD
Reporter
Artists are divergent
thinkers who perform a great service. They
push us off our treadmills – rocketing our thoughts off into space or
make us
notice the tiny worlds that exist within our everyday world. This
month’s Truth
or Consequences’ Art Hop offered
both perspectives. |
If you're an inductive thinker
- taking one small
idea and generalizing, expanding, con- necting and applying it to draw
a
big
conclusion – go to Parisi’s at 420 Broadway to look at Charles Nissen’s
“Bug
Show,” first.
Nissen
says he usually
paints surreal landscapes, but last summer
he extended his terrain beyond
his brain to include the
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real world.
“I wanted to paint smaller works
people could afford. But I wanted to paint bigger then life.” Painting
bugs larger - then - life answered. “They’re kind of surreal anyway,”
said Nissen, who admits he is not a bug collector or amateur
entomologist.
As the year progressed, people would ask, “Are
going to paint a dragonfly? Those are my favorite,” and Nissen would
comply. He researched various websites for the images, learning as he
continued and diverged from his original intent to do only beetles.
The paintings are six-by-six inches or nine-by-thirteen inches. All of
them are acrylic, have gray backgrounds with the bug painted from a
foot-raised- above-just before squishing view.
They are
neither painted in the hyper-real style of Surrealist Dali nor
scientific detail of a com- missioned illustrator. Because they are
generally – not particularly – observed, the icky blown up bug ‘Alien’
factor is missing. So, too, is the Jules Verne awe factor – the
realization that the universe is a big clock-works with tiny creatures’
mechanisms mirroring own plumbing. Only one painting had a hint of
anthropomorphizing to give it the ‘don’t kill me, I’m your brother
Gregor’ thrill in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”
Nissen says, “I realized
I could sorta do a portrait," referring to a painting
of what |
fly,
its head given a fish-eye convex focus.
For deductive thinkers – drawing a particular conclusion
from a big picture – go to Main Street Gallery first. Terry Allen has
been working on spaceships. “I have been feeling so claustrophobic on
this planet,” he says. “I felt brain dead for six months. Once I
dropped to total depression, I started having these dreams and I came
alive. I’m having a lot of fun with these.”
The dreams were of “hotel spaceships,” says Allen, who
realized to get some other planet via spaceship would take “75, 150
years – I don’t know. But it would be the Children’s children that
would arrive. Some would live their whole lives on the ship.”
Allen’s space ship paintings, which express a desire to get
off world, have been fueled by CNN’s Jack Cafferty’s question – how do
we save the planet? Viewers, said Allen, responded that there are too
many people. “Stop having all these kids,” was the response, says Allen.
“Just leaving and starting New” is the inspiration for the
paintings.
“Would we do it better this time?” I ask.
“Not necessarily,” Says Allen Citing Bill Moyers’ show Allen
says, “You know our satellites are in jeopardy from all the junk we’ve
left in outer space? The junk might hit them.”
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