I had a wonderful day, between lunch with a good friend at Lidia's Kansas City, and a stroll through two of Kansas City's great small art galleries on Baltimore St. near the Freight House, in the southern part of the Kansas City Crossroads.
The
two galleries are similarly named near-neighbors, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, and Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. This entry focuses on my
visit to Sherry Leedy's gallery. In an earlier entry I talked about some
fascinating artwork I found at Leedy-Voulkos.
The Texture Tour
The artwork that really spoke to me at this gallery all seemed to be playing with texture in one way or another.
In the artwork of Julia Fernandez-Pol, it is the actual, physical texture of the oil paint, which I'd guess must have been applied with a palette knife, that is the most riveting aspect.
For me, the rich colors and textures in these images added up to a delicious visual feast that rewards the eye on many levels.
The textures of Mark Lyon, on the other hand, are created as two-dimensional visual texture, and created in a most unusual way. Lyon describes his evolution into using the "machine-assisted" "humidrawer" technique in an interesting essay on his website.
The artwork appears to be a large photograph, from a distance. Move in closer, however, and you'll discover the amazing patterns within.
My favorite, I think, was the portrait of Michael Rees (shown at right), because when I looked very closely, I realized the areas inside the eyeglass frames had been rendered like a spiral moving in from the frames to the center.
To give an idea of how these textures work, I pulled a couple of examples from Lyon's site. These are two different renderings of an eye, one using only black lines, as in Michael Rees, and the other using both black and white lines on a toned surface.
IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to the Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art artist pages for the images of Julia Fernandez-Pol's Lily Pad Light and Mark Lyon's Michael Rees (click on the artist's name for images; the image pages themselves don't seem to have a URL). The "eye detail" images are from Mark Lyon's website. Many thanks for all!
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| Julia Fernandez-Pol's Lily Pad Light is rich with texture. |
The Texture Tour
The artwork that really spoke to me at this gallery all seemed to be playing with texture in one way or another.
In the artwork of Julia Fernandez-Pol, it is the actual, physical texture of the oil paint, which I'd guess must have been applied with a palette knife, that is the most riveting aspect.
For me, the rich colors and textures in these images added up to a delicious visual feast that rewards the eye on many levels.
 |
| Mark Lyon's Michael Rees |
The artwork appears to be a large photograph, from a distance. Move in closer, however, and you'll discover the amazing patterns within.
My favorite, I think, was the portrait of Michael Rees (shown at right), because when I looked very closely, I realized the areas inside the eyeglass frames had been rendered like a spiral moving in from the frames to the center.
To give an idea of how these textures work, I pulled a couple of examples from Lyon's site. These are two different renderings of an eye, one using only black lines, as in Michael Rees, and the other using both black and white lines on a toned surface.
 |
| Mark Lyons 2-D texture created with mechanical help: Left: black and white lines on a toned surface; Right black lines only. |
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