Comment on Abstract animals are forcefully figurative

A Montana artist asks us if we see what he sees — with the answer left up to us — in a superb show of his work. The artist is Theodore Waddell whose paintings of cattle, horses and dogs are forcefully figurative, yet modern and semiabstract. His “Do You See What I See?” show of “painted conversations” is at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63. Born in 1941, Waddell said he paints to alter his perception of his world by “manipulating color, form placement, light, materials and scale.” Three dark brown horses standing together seem to almost become one “Horse,” in an oil whose thick paint appears to be slathered on the canvas. Equally heavy-handed, in a good way, is an oil in which only their dark coats separate “Angus” cattle from sunlit boulders and the bright sky. Letting us step farther back, to see both the whole and the sum of the parts, are two giant triptychs, called “Beaverhead Angus” and “Argenta Horses.” Dark cattle graze in front of a mighty mountain range in the former, while horses in the latter stand before a line of pale gold fall cottonwoods. In two very large diptychs, “Steinbeck's Sheep” and “Monida Angus,” animal forms are less recognizable and more abstract. The sheep are reduced to dark dripping blobs in pale blue-green grass, and the cattle become little more than dark marks in a snowy landscape. Even more abstract in some ways is “White Cloud Sheep,” a large oil in which the dripping forms could be either the clouds or the sheep. Much less heavily painted and nearly ghostly, are the dripping, shadowy forms that emerge from a white haze in an oil-encaustic called “Bannack Horses.” A gray-white horses merges with and contemplates its own watery reflection as it drinks in “Lynn's Narcissus” by Waddell, whose wife's name is Lynn. Containing a good selection of prints and oil-encaustic, oil-graphite and oil drawings on paper, as well as the large paintings, the show is highly recommended. The “Do You See What I See?Read more on NewsOK.com