Photographer's bird's-eye view finds our surface geometry
Pilot and photographer Alex MacLean shoots while he flies. His daredevil antics garner him some amazing color photos that capture the abstract in aerial views without losing the sense of landscape.
The photographer's show "Air Lines" at the Peabody Essex Museum in 2005 focused on the geometry of the land, in particular the straight lines people have plowed into and tarred over the earth. You'll see some of that in "Over The Top," MacLean's latest show at Miller Block Gallery, which takes viewers over Italy.
"Tuscan Cemetery, Frassinetto, Italy" shows the furrows of two fields at sharp angles to each other, meeting along the seam of a road, basking in golden sunlight. A small cemetery nests in the center of all the intersecting lines. Tall trees bordering the cemetery cast long, inky shadows at right angles to the lines of the field across the street. The taut composition could not have been what the farmers had in mind when they plowed, but it snaps together visually as if carefully planned.
MacLean shot most of these images along the Italian coast, where the geometries of sunbathing are as formal as those of farming. "Walkway to the Beach, Lido di Spina, Italy" has us peering down at orange and white pinwheels of beach umbrellas set in uniform rows, each with a dark shadow below it. A paved walkway drops among them, adding more order. Only the beach chairs, splayed this way and that, break rank.
Not everything along the coast is in a straight line. Some of MacLean's images focus on the scalloped shore, along which tiny bathers frolic. Always, his photographs take the long view, not just from high above, but in the way that he considers landscape: It's like a great sheet of paper that humanity draws on, but it has a life that stretches long before, and probably after, the marks that we leave there.
Tiny epics, layers of tone
Raja Ram Sharma, trained in Indian miniature painting, is a master temple painter in Rajasthan, India. He outlines in black the same nine images of Hindu gods on sacred cloth paintings and has apprentices fill in the color. In his spare time, he paints miniatures, grinding his own minerals for pigment and painting with a brush made with one squirrel hair. His first US exhibit of such works is on view at Victoria Munroe Fine Art.
The 6-by-8-inch paintings are monuments to detail. Several landscapes consider recent droughts in Rajasthan, depicting parched earth or longed-for rain. The brilliant "Passing Storm" shows slashes of rain drenching sparsely planted, undulating green hills, with a pale cityscape in the distance. Sharma has imbued the gray sky with a coppery sheen, and the dark clouds shimmer.
He also paints 16th-century palace architecture with all its ornamentation, as well as the occasional horse, such as "Horse With Pink Head Dress," duded up with pink ribbons and gold collar. The detail work boggles in these paintings, but it's the landscapes that, despite their size, seem epic.
Also at Victoria Munroe, Patrick Cauley's luminous abstract works, bright and deeply layered, come across as a dance of the veils. There's always the sense of something more to be revealed. This is true despite Cauley's emphasis, in this body of work, on surface gestures.
Look at "David Series 11." The first things you see are the raucous forms - boxes unfolding and tumbling, broad ovals, great black squiggles. They jangle and jive together over a ground of translucent blue-green. More forms pulse just below the surface. These exuberant works play a rhythm of shapes against washes of color. They flirt with the viewer, grabbing attention with bold lines, then retreating under layers of tone.
High marks
In the middle of "On Drawing: Surface, Line, Mark," a delightful exhibit at the New Art Center in Newton put together by Jessica Burko and Deborah Putnoi, viewers are invited to sit down and scribble in a central "Drawing Space." Circling the space are works by several artists who draw daily, with descriptions in each case of how making a mark led to creating a work of art. There's also audio of the sounds of drawing.
The emphasis on process reminds us that everybody can draw, and many derive pleasure from it. Putnoi includes a video projection of her hand sketching; it's captivating to watch forms arise. The relative sophistication of the art on view tempts with what's possible.
Highlights include Randy Garber's drawings on piano rolls, looping and spiraling in giant ear shapes out from the wall, covered with images about communication and connection - brains, joined hands.
Basil El Halwagy's voluptuous drawings in white pastel on black, such as "Robot's Desire," a scene of birds feasting on berries, result, according to wall text, from the artist following his hand. Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship's "Three Flowers" sprang from her observation of dried flowers. In this series of three, they seem to wither, then explode into dust - all about decay and death, but the artist's mark-making fills the images with life.
