Gallery Hopping

Joe and I started our gallery tour at L’attitude. They’ve been selling indoor and outdoor sculpture for 15 years—arriving on Newbury Street around the same time that I stopped working in the area. Hmmph. They also show some fab 2-D work but I was most taken by the small sculptures and vases. The glass work was stunning. I particularly liked the vase that evoked Edvard Munch’s The Scream. OK, maybe it’s just me who sees The Scream in all those fab swirls.

Besides getting to goggle a bunch of strikingly handsome work, here’s another reason to stop in at L’attitude—affordable art.  You won't need to take out a bank loan in order to add beauty to your home. Fabulous! Farther down Newbury there are galleries selling Picasso and Dali prints for tens of thousands. Art as investment versus art as life, joy and marvel.

One eye sees, the other feels.
~Paul Klee

The Society of Arts and Crafts has a BRILL furniture show on right now: Stay In Touch: Seven Years of the John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship.  Beautiful, imaginative, just plain cool and inventive furniture AND the gallery ladies invited us to sit in the chairs, to stroke the smooth inviting grain of the wood. Art you can touch!

The Arden Gallery was having a big show of Ben Steele’s fun paintings. Sunday Afternoon at Fenway Park is done in the style of Seurat of course. Under the Stars features a ‘40s era drive in movie theater, showing Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The DaVinci Diner has Mona looking on—probably making sure that no fisticuffs break out in the parking lot.

The work that just knocked mesideways, took my breath away, won the day was Beth Carter’s magnificently BRILLIANT sculptures at The Axelle Gallery.

Greeting gallery visitors is a seated candy red, male nude with a horses head.
Dancing with Morpheus—an antler headed dude, in clear distress, stands just inside the entrance.
A little king being led on leash by a small, bunny eared girl stands in an alcove.

I’d never seen Ms. Carter’s work before. They’re wickedly transporting—like sculpture versions of Neil Gaiman or Charles DeLint’s stories or a Midsummer Night’s Dream (only naked and not having this much fun).

Yup, I'm a BIG fan now.

Joe and I stopped in at Newbury Fine Arts, DTR Modern Galleries, The Guild of Boston Artists and The Copley Society of Art. All carried lovely, in some cases brilliantly so, work but it was all pretty damn tame (or investment pieces)—still lifes and landscapes mostly. Nothing as striking as Stephen Hannock’s vistas though (by the by, check out Hannock's work found at that linky—he's flat out brill).

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
~Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
~Pablo Picasso