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Arts and Entertainment

Purple cats, orange dogs, joy all around

Arts Center presents show of ebullient art

With one ear cocked, a red-orange dog quizzically looks out of a painting directly at the viewer. A truculent blue dog sits broad-beamed on a sculpture stand, licking his golden lips. A silhouetted rabbit chases a tiny green-and-red bus downhill toward a meadow of black leaves. A pink car ambles along a yellow road trailing a sign that reads, “Just married.”

These are descriptions of works by four professional artists exhibited in “Purple Cats and Green Skies: The Influence of Children’s Art on the 20th Century Art World.” Curator Juanita Ainsley, a local painter who recently has had two solo shows at Durango Arts Center and Fort Lewis College, invited three other artists to join her for the spring show.

“All have childlike ways of working,” Ainsley said in a recent interview. “I like each one’s sense of abandonment and of a freedom to discover. All the work is colorful and playful, with no attempt to make things realistic.”

Rodney Hatfield, a wildly inventive artist-musician who shows regularly in Santa Fe, painted the comical orange canine. “A Dog Always Knows What Time It Is” shows Hatfield’s paint-encrusted subject standing against a blue sky under a pale blue moon.

Melanie Yazzie, professor of printmaking at the University of Colorado in Boulder, crafted a stubby aqua dog and had it cast in bronze, but she’s more famous for her prints, which are bold and celebratory. Also known for her workshops worldwide, Yazzie will offer a monotype workshop April 25-26 at DAC.

In her large painting “Round Trip,” Ainsley has inserted a small, green bus as if it were an afterthought, but it may have triggered the title. Ainsley begins her works with a single image, then develops her colorful and complex compositions with an intuitive process of selection.

In “Wedding in Israel,” Santa Fe writer-artist Natalie Goldberg takes a bird’s eye view of a village set among orange hills, and a tiny car rides toward a blue temple with a pink dome under a sky filled with rows of stars. How better to express a memorable day in one’s life?

“Purple Cats” is fanciful, awkward in spots, and bursting with imagination. The grown-ups’ exhibit later will be joined by an exhibit of selected works from local students. Kudos to DAC Education Director Sandra Butler, Exhibits Director Mary Pullen and local art teachers for finding a new, more creative template than the formerly overloaded Creativity Festivity.

The exhibit invites viewers to set aside deeply held preferences for Western realism in favor of fantasy, invention and expression. More than 100 years have passed since the majority of serious artists abandoned imitative realism in favor of impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, et al.

Enthusiasm for children’s art springs from the early 20th century, and many serious artists collected and were inspired by tadpole figures, not to mention scribbling. Children have a direct line to inner creative energy, and around 1900, avant-garde artists started tapping in. “Primitivism” became the catch-all term.

You can sense the influence of Picasso, Kandinsky and Klee in the DAC show. More importantly, the exhibitors operate as children might in front of a white sheet of paper – they just begin. It’s called the discovery method, and it generally wasn’t employed before the modern era.

This spontaneous, inside-out method rejected planning, sketching or making grids – the accepted studio approach used for centuries. Freely exploring color, experimenting with space and texture, simplifying shapes, and above all, enjoying the simple act of creation became a new way to make art. It’s something intangible yet apparent in the spring DAC show.

jreynolds@durangoherald.com. Judith Reynolds is a Durango writer, art historian and arts journalist.

Denver museum exhibit complements local show

“Juan Miró: Instinct and Imagination” currently is on view at The Denver Art Museum. The exhibit is a perfect companion to the Durango Arts Center’s current show, “Purple Cats and Green Skies: The Influence of Children’s Art on the 20th Century Art World.” Co-sponsored by museums in Seattle and Madrid, the Miró exhibit contains more than 50 works, many never seen in the United States.

At a time when European artists were captivated by what they termed “primitive,” the Spanish artist took special notice of his daughter’s drawings and saw her fanciful inventions. He altered his approach and developed what he called biomorphic abstraction. Miró continued to invent a playful universe well into old age.

The traveling show continues in Denver through June 28 when it moves to Duke University. For information, visit www.denverartmuseum.org.

If you go

“Purple Cats and Green Skies: The Influence of Children’s Art on the 20th Century Art World,” a group exhibit with works by Juanita Ainsley, Natalie Goldberg, Rodney Hatfield and Melanie Yazzie. Durango Arts Center Library, 802 E. Second Ave., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday through May 2. For information, call 259-2606 or visit www.durangoarts.org.

“Innocent Wisdom,” a free companion lecture for the Durango Arts Center exhibit “Purple Cats and Green Trees,” will be offered at 3 p.m. Thursday, in the DAC Theatre. Judith Reynolds, arts critic for The Durango Herald, will begin with the old cliché, “My grandchild can do that” and explore why it has become a truism in contemporary art. Works by Kandinsky, Picasso, Klee, Matisse and Miró will provide a platform for comment on regional artists who work in a childlike manner.

May 25, 2018
Local artist Juanita Ainsley dies at 80


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