At a time when tech-heavy techniques are ubiquitous, it's refreshing to encounter shows at three Minneapolis galleries featuring terrific work in such old-fashioned made-by-hand media as painting, drawing, cut-paper and sculptural ceramics, glass and metal.
Groveland Gallery
Trained as a photographer, Charles Lyon long ago shifted to painting but taps his camera skills when cropping images, focusing on details, shifting scale and playing with light and shadow in the huge, colorful paintings of flowers for which he is rightly acclaimed. Two years ago, however, an encounter with the sculpture of Baroque artist Gianlorenzo Bernini set Lyon on an unexpected detour that resulted in 23 paintings of angels featured in "Rome: Traversing the Sacred."
The paintings were inspired by 10 sculptures of angels, designed around 1670 by Bernini and followers, that grace the Ponte Sant'Angelo, an ancient bridge spanning the Tiber between secular Rome and the Vatican neighborhood. Their flowing garments, tender gazes and clutch of Christian symbols — cross, nails, crown of thorns — mark them as devoutly Catholic monuments, but Lyon is clearly inspired most by their beauty.
After centuries of exposure, the angels' marble faces and garments are streaked and stained, effects he deftly imitates with mottled overlays of taupe, sooty-gray and rose. He catches the play of light and shadow across the rippling folds of their garments, their wind-tossed curls and the dreamy look in their stony eyes. He's even essayed drapery studies of fabric falling from bare knees, a peekaboo effect much loved by Baroque masters.
In new oil sketches in Groveland's Annex, Carl Oltvedt adds figures to the landscapes for which he is best known — typically a woman strolling through a park, or on a rocky North Shore beach, sometimes with a friend, children or a dog. Looser brush work and more casual compositions — as if the scenes were glimpsed in passing — freshen his work, although his best effects are still light dancing off water or the dappled illumination of dark, leafy glades.
Noon-5 p.m. Tue.-Sat. Ends April 18 • free • 25 Groveland Terrace, Mpls. • 612-377-7800 •grovelandgallery.com
Burnet Gallery
Four Minnesota-based artists float from realism to abstraction in telling "Someone Else's Story," as this show is enigmatically titled.
Teo Nguyen limns the brooding poetry of Minnesota landscapes in five paintings that are all gray skies and stubbled fields. With intricately cut white paper, Sonja Peterson creates a lacy tablecloth-sized tableau in which fish swim through tangles of seaweed that blossoms into a leafy aviary aflutter with exotic birds.
