art
Dealer’s Choice “Full House,” Chaffee Downtown
A
t the Chaff ee Downtown gallery, the fourth annual “Full House” exhibition features fi ve Vermont artists. The card game referenced by the show’s name is not one of strategy but of artistic choice; the Chaff ee opens with a made hand of artists Peter Lundberg, Skip Martin, Joshua Rome, Brigitte Rutenberg and Claemar (Kleng) T. Walker. Four comfortable chairs surround a table near the back of the gallery; viewers might consider sitting down and taking the time to look. Rutenberg’s ink-on-vellum collages draw viewers in close. Described by the artist as “paper quilts,” her work is collage, quilt and picture in one. “Women have traditionally occupied themselves in their lives with detail,” Rutenberg says in her artist statement, “which led them to become ‘quilters’ by nature, putting small things together for the purpose of creating a larger one.” Her twofold process is intricate. Postage-stamp-size drawings — ink on tiny pieces of vellum — are partially attached to board, creating a layered texture. The drawings themselves consist of crosshatches, geometric designs, fl owers, trees and miniature abstractions. Collaged together, they form a larger image. In Rutenberg’s largest collages, “Kimono” (36 by 24.5 inches) and “The Wedding Quilt” (35 by 27.5 inches), hundreds of drawings compose the images. “The Wedding Quilt” evokes the classic motif of interlocking rings, known to quilters as the Double Wedding Ring pattern. Martin’s digital color photography is straightforward documentation of the natural world, such as a long shot skyward in “Golden Aspens” (10 by 15 inches), or elk captured in “A Dance.” As a boy, Martin spent summers wandering the Ozarks, treasuring “the peace of wild places and the wonders that nature revealed,” he writes in an artist statement. “Photos captured those little happy times we can never relive.” Having inherited his father’s camera, Martin continues to share those intimate, fl eeting moments in the natural world, connecting viewers to his experience and their own. “Winter Dust” (5 by 15 inches) revels in the beauty of geometry as displayed by a mountainous landscape.
“One for the Ladies” by Joshua Rome
66 ART
SEVEN DAYS
01.29.14-02.05.14
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
REVIEW
“Aglow” by Skip Martin
Mood and narrative elevate Joshua Rome’s woodblock prints, such as the 15-by-9-inch “Market Day,” a portrait of a man with a bundle on his back pushing an empty cart; or the dark, mesmerizing palette of “Moonlight on the Water”
“Jambalaya” by Peter Lundberg
“Mystery of the Waistline” by Brigitte Rutenberg
(33 by 10 inches). At the age of 21, Rome planned to study Japanese cabinetry, according to his biography, but an appreciation for color and paper in woodblock prints claimed his interest. So did Japan itself. Rome apprenticed with Amer-
ican-born, Japanese-style woodblock artist Clifton Karhu and lived for more than 20 years in the mountains outside Kyoto, documenting the lives of his fellow villagers using the traditional printing technique.