Remember pink? No, not the singer. The color. As you may recall, April once brought drifts of pink petals fluttering from ornamental plum and apple trees. Pink-tinged magnolia blossoms flickered in gardens. Pale tulips opened, and pink lilacs budded along with their lavender cousins. Really. It happened once upon a time, and true believers think they might live to see it again. Not this month, but maybe yet this year.
Sigh.
When Minneapolis painter Charles Lyon set out to paint a whole show of enormous, mostly pink blossoms last year, he probably had no idea how much we would need them this spring. His glorious Groveland Gallery show of three-foot-diameter dahlias, translucent peony petals and creamy bridal roses tinged with coral and morning-sun yellow is a perfect antidote to the lingering grays of winter.
Paintings, photos and collages by four other artists inject color, life and good cheer into this glum season in shows closing all too soon at three other Minneapolis galleries. Take heart and see them.
Groveland Gallery and Annex
Lyon's startlingly beautiful blooms seemed even more improbable last week as a blizzard raged and icy slush glazed the streets. Magnified to big-screen proportions, his painted flowers are as fresh and delicate as when first picked, their myriad shades of pink and rose shimmering with summer promise.
The spiky twisted petals of his "Clear Choice" dahlia flare as if about to take flight. With artistic sleight-of-hand he uses curls of very pale, translucent blue to suggest the bowered heart of a white peony and the transparent fragility of another white beauty, "Dahlia #6." A wedding bouquet inspired his pretty watercolors of roses, their blousy heads depicted close-up as whorls of pink highlighted with saffron, mint, tangerine and even taupe as the blooms die away.
His show wraps up with several meadows of brown-eyed susans nodding in the heat of a late summer evening. Imagine. (And thank you, Charlie.)
In Groveland's adjacent Annex, Hamline University art professor Andrew Wykes reports on a summer sojourn in Ireland whose ever-verdant landscape inspired his handsome abstractions. Titles such as "Carrowmore From Ballycastle" or "Belmullet" hint at specific places, but identities dissolve into poetic reveries in horizontal images layered with green and aqua, dappled blue and misty gray. Both shows are on view for just one more week, and they are so worth the trip.
