It had been a long time since we were able to get to the Final Friday-of-the-month open gallery evening at the Pendleton Arts Center. We first went last summer, but our attendance dropped off when the evenings got darker earlier and also when other social engagements and travel intervened. So we were happy this past week that an empty spot on the calendar showed up on the last Friday of May and that it was good weather for driving into Cincinnati. We drove down Winton Road, avoiding the interstate at rush hour. Then with the help of Gladys, our GPS lady, we maneuvered through the twisty, curving and unknown (to us) streets of the inner city, and arrived on Pendleton Street just around 6:00 PM when the galleries were opening. The parking lot was already full, but we found on-street parking a couple blocks away in a residential neighborhood, in front of some old brick houses where families were sitting out on the stoop to enjoy the evening breeze, and small children were blowing soap bubbles.
One of the nice things about Final Friday is the opportunity to talk with the artists. We met and had a nice discussion with Katherine Thomas in the gallery she shares with seven other artist members of the Cincinnati Art Club on the first floor. I was enchanted with her realistic paintings built around a bit of fancy--the row of houses built by the side of a piano keyboard and surrounded by sheet music, currently shown on her homepage, really caught my eye and brings music to my imagination as I think back on it.
We popped into the gallery of Philip Compton, who does "iPhoneography," because I remembered him from previous visits. Alas, he wasn't there when we were, but his business manager gave us a glass of wine and we chatted about his technique and his subjects. All his work starts as digital photographs taken with his iPhone; then he works with 20 or so different apps and his creativity to produce vastly different works, some recognizable from the original photo, some not. All are striking or beautiful or surprising, and many are two or three of those. A few are available for viewing on his Facebook page.
We chatted at length with glass sculptor Joseph Drury, who works in recycled glass to produce gorgeous works of art that you can see on his homepage. He collects used glass from everywhere he can and told us that when he came to open the gallery this week, there were bottles and sheets of glass waiting at his door. I didn't know that European and U.S. glass manufacturing used different techniques in production and thus need different techniques in reworking them, but Joe told us how he had found out the hard way not to blend the two. We then had a far-ranging discussion of which beer bottles are the preferred, both for art work and for their contents. Now I am wondering whether the green Carlsberg bottles we collect slowly but regularly at our house will be useful for him in his domestic or international works.
When we left the Pendleton building two hours later and walked to the car, the families were still sitting out on the stoop but the children had used up all their bubble water. We were surprised to discover Reading Road at the next corner and followed it for a leisurely 45 minutes all the way out to our normal driving area.
No comments:
Post a Comment