Isalos Fine Art

 Philip Koch, The Whisper II, oil on panel, 12" x 16", $2,800

Philip Koch has been busy. His mid-career retrospective,  "Unbroken Thread: Nature Paintings and the American Imagination" will start a five-museum tour:

The University of Maryland University College (May 4 through June 22)

The Maryland Institute College of Art ( February - March, 2009)

The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA (June - August 2009)

The Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN (June - September, 2010)

Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI (early 2011) 

Of course, you can see his work here at Isalos, too. If that's not enough, there's a great article about him in the April issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. There he is, right next to an article about Wayne Thiebaud. I'll admit, I'd never seen this magazine before, but it's beautiful and the articles are well-written and readable. (I get some of the other art magazines, but I look at the pictures and fall asleep while reading the articles).

 It's business as usual here in Stonington. It snows, the snow melts, the melodramas come and go. Occasionally we see cars with out of state plates, usually pulling up at the real estate offices. The roads are treacherous with frost heaves, and the harbor is still full of fishing boats, some rigged with scallop gear. Our oil bills have been outrageous, and I hear plenty of complaints about winter. Still, I have to admit, every time it starts to snow, I love watching those flakes come down. Maybe it would be different if we had television reception (I think it's a good reason not to have it).

We saw at least 42 galleries in  the last couple of weeks. That’s quite a bunch if you’re really taking a good look, and you can become almost dizzy with  the effort. Most of these we saw last Thursday and Friday, our final days of travel.

After Port Hadlock, we took a ferry to just north of Seattle and saw a few more galleries. One gallerist won my “most solicitous” award. In a gallery of her own paintings, she left her students in the back room to hover beside us, pointing out the merits of each of her paintings, comparing her water lilies to Monet’s. She didn’t wait for any reaction or clue from us, just launched into her spiel. I couldn’t get out of there soon enough. This is why many of us hesitate to even enter single-artist galleries.

For First Thursday, we focused on the Pioneer Square area. It was raining heavily when we arrived. We put on our rain gear and forged ahead to the first galleries, where the rain obviously kept the attendance down. Then, through the tall corner windows of a building ahead, we saw the brightly-lit, glowing colors of what could only be a ten-foot high hanging Dale Chihuly sculpture.
It drew us out of the dark and rain into the Foster White Gallery, a huge space with a new show opening by two painters, Sherry Bakes and James Martin.

I immediately liked Bakes’ vague landscapes, but I wasn’t sure about Martin’s small, crudely-painted fantasies. I kept looking though, and the more I looked, the more they grew on me. They were loosely painted on what appeared to be kraft paper, simply framed and affordably-priced (about $650 to $1200). Most seemed to have some sort of story going on: a fancy yellow car up on blocks surrounded by a scene acted-out by scantily-clad starlets and cowboys, with the occasional celebrity like Andy Warhol or Van Gogh mixing things up with anthropomorphized lions. The paintings made me smile, and as more visitors arrived, I found I wasn’t the only one. I looked the whole collection over a couple of times, and settled on the lion’s head on the Pez dispenser body. All I had to do was put it on the credit card, but that card had gone through  a tough workout lately, and I left feeling a pang of loss.

We followed the growing crowd to more galleries, including the Tishuro Kaplan building, where artist studios and “corridor galleries” were open. If you wanted wine and crackers, these are the places to go (food and drink were noticeably absent at the bigger galleries, except for a few of the privleged few visitors). Here, the artists were much more adventurously dressed and pierced, and the media was likely to include menstrual blood, “ritual” blood and hair on doilies.

On Friday, we continued our gallery walk to the Pike Market area and downtown where we visited another ten or so galleries. Our flight was at midnight, so we had some time to kill, but we were all getting a bit weary. Highlights included the Lisa Harris Gallery, the William Traver Gallery, and photographs at the Benham Gallery. When one gallery attendant asked “so, what do you think?” I was at a loss. (Would I ask such a general question of my visitors? Probably not.)

At the mall, where we had to catch the monorail back to the car, we sat down and ate a pizza, getting up one last burst of energy for the last gallery, which was nearby: yes, the “Painter of Light” himself, Thomas Kinkade. The gallery was done-up like a quaint village shoppe, with multiple panes of glass showcasing the sweet scenes of yesteryear inside. We poked our heads in and saw that the shoppe-keeper was making a sale- the only one I witnessed taking place in over forty galleries.

That lion with the Pez body still hasn’t sold. Aw shucks, now it has.