Review: "Tree Town Trio" art exhibit at Sweetwaters

Posted on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 : 5:14 a.m.

Review: "Tree Town Trio" art exhibit at Sweetwaters

By John Carlos Cantu

Sweetwaters Cafe’s “Tree Town Trio: A Symphony of Color” features three local artists whose inventive talent is ultimately as lyrical as their devotion to art itself.

For the display is indeed a symphony of color as each artist — Ilona Brustad, Theresa Rojas, and Pam Roselle — complements her partners in much the same manner that brass, woodwinds and strings complement each other in a musical composition.

There’s enough similarity to their 43 works on display at Sweetwaters to suggest a visual unity. But there are also enough differences among them to mark out specific aesthetic territories that subtly combine and separate like recurrent motifs in a symphonic movement.

Brustad has contributed the most thorough-going three-dimensional art to the exhibit. Her 14 mixed-media mosaics range from handmade tiles and cathedral glass to found objects and shells that are limited only by (as she says in her artist statement) “almost any solid object [she] can adhere to a backing board.”Â

Brustad says she finds “the shift of color and texture of mosaic natural and intriguing.” And her “The Great Gate of Kiev” in the Sweetwater foyer enthusiastically mirrors Modest Mussorgsky’s triumphal interpretation of architect Viktor Hartmann’s competition-winning watercolor design for a commemorative Kiev gate that was never completed and later musically interpreted by Mussorgsky after his young friend’s unexpected death. Brustad’s “Great Gate” mosaic, akin to Hartmann’s original watercolor design, is constructed out of blue tiles with additional minute regal details contrasted against gold starbursts.

Roselle works largely in genre painting with a penchant for panoramic landscapes. She says her intent is to “create bodies of work that express the essence of nature and its inherent rhythms” — and her art does just that. Roselle’s 16 mixed-medias and acrylics on board feature intricate layers of color that reflect seasonal textures.

Working to please, as she says, “the eye and the soul,” Roselle’s paintings run from artworks like “Blue Bamboo,” where a trio of bamboo yellow stems is interlaced with a cove of blue bamboo, to the fiercely chromatic “Ocean Deep,” where she dramatically stacks a half-dozen bands of swirling mixed-media pigments to handsome, animated impressionistic effect.

Finally, Rojas’ 13 polymers on board and acrylic crackle on board paintings fall somewhat artistically between Brudstad’s mosaics and Roselle’s genre paintings. Rojas’ energetic surface tension (a crackle she calls “fauxsaic”) is the largest part of the inspiration for her self-named “treescapes” and “sunscapes.” These nature motifs fuel Rojas’ inspiration to experiment with this form of art that falls between two-dimensional representation and three-dimensional relief. Â

“Fauxsaic Tree” illustrates Rojas’ working method. This “treescape” is similar to the impulse behind Roselle’s painting, but her execution is three-dimensionally akin to Brustad’s mosaic. Using two shades of blue for half of the work’s background and a yellow-green design for the other half, Rojas creates a tree with its bare limbs supplicating upward through a half-dozen tan and brown shades of “fauxsaic” crackle. Scanning Rojas’ “Fauxsaic Tree” is a lot like following the shifting moods of an especially spirited symphony — a visual “tree town” music, so to speak.

John Carlos CantÃº is a free-lance writer who reviews art for AnnArbor.com.

“Tree Town Trio: A Symphony in Color” will continue through Aug. 31 at Sweetwaters Cafe, 123 W. Washington St. Cafe hours are 7 a.m.-midnight, Monday-Friday, and 7:30 a.m.-midnight, Saturday and Sunday. For information, call 734-769-2331.

Top image: "Northern Hardwoods" by Pam Roselle. Left image: "The Great Gate of Kiev" by Ilona Brustad. Right image: "Fauxsaic" Tree by Theresa Rojas. All are on display in 'Tree Town Trio.'

Comments

Theresa

Mon, Aug 17, 2009 : 11:49 p.m.

Does anyone know if this review is going to be in the print version?

Pam Roselle

Mon, Aug 17, 2009 : 8:34 a.m.

Correction: Top image: "Northern Hardwoods" by Pam Roselle (not Pam Rojas)