Art Review: Colors Come To Fore

Colorful realistic-expressive paintings and stylized “aerial landscapes” contrast nicely with a relative lack of hue, in three solo exhibits. The shows by Carol Beesley of Norman, Bob Nunn of Dallas, and John Wolfe of Oklahoma City, are at JRB Art at The Elms, 2810 N Walker. University of Oklahoma professor emeritus Beesley brings the most vivid color schemes to her mixed media oil, acrylic and watercolor works. A big red bluff reflects in blue waters, in front of lush yellow-green plants, in Beesley's large, eye-catching 72-by-86-inch oil of New Mexico's “Ghost Ranch.” Blue dominates a lower key, subtle but satisfying depiction of “The Pedernal,” offering us a new take on a favorite subject of Georgia O'Keeffe. Rocks “Off the Trail” at Quartz Mountain partly block passage to the top, while snow or white space “NearTurner Falls”seems semiabstract, in two more of her works. A horizontal format aides Beesley's portrayals of a pink New Mexico mesa behind green fields, giving way to a diamond pattern, and of Colorado's red “Echo Mesa Canyon.” Aerial views of richly earth-toned land forms, alternate with sky, water, rivers and places where people live, indicated by dots, in the oils of Dallas native Nunn. Cubistically subdivided planes add impact to a Nunn oil called “Refracted: A Far Better Place,” and to a work offering us “Another View” of a town sandwiched between red rock towers. Crowns, circles, ovals and jagged geometric shapes are suggested by Wolfe's paper constructions, made from cut up pieces of paper, in muted pink-rosy and off-white shades. Closer to white, but with rusty iron oxide stains, are Wolfe's reduction fired, ceramic, “paper clay” structures, stacked up like two or three-story, buildings, of some odd sort. A bit more cohesive, yet also abstract are Wolfe's small white ceramic forms, on dark wooden bases, which can bring to mind anything from weird waves to bird heads or strange teeth. Wolfe is a longtime artist-educator-sculptor and assemblage artist.Read more on NewsOK.com