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Two neighborhood gallery venues enliven the early months of winter

by Heather Joyner

Westward along a half-mile stretch of Kingston Pike beginning around McKay's Books are a number of art galleries and antique stores that would benefit from a more pedestrian-friendly Knoxville. In fact, I wish they'd move downtown and host the sort of coordinated openings that energize cities like Portland, Ore., on the first Thursday of every month. Then, Borders and Barnes and Noble could relocate to the Homberg Place area and the projected scary-ass prison could be plunked down near the highway patrol boys past im-Morrell Road. Are you listening, O county? At present, the Bennett, Hanson, and Susan Key Galleries are at least within walking distance of one another if you can stand the SUV exhaust fumes. And the latter two are exhibiting new and interesting work throughout the next few weeks.

Hanson kicks off the season with Faces and Figures, an eclectic show featuring paintings by the local Cynthia Markert, and by artists from further afield. Carved ceramics, glass pieces, and Grady Kinsey's amusing constructions perched atop spindly "legs" round out the show. April Street, director of sculpture projects for Abingdon, Va.'s, William King Regional Arts Center, occupies the most wall space (including some at Lula on Market Square, as well) with intriguing mixed media works. Her "Girls and Trucks" and "Boy in Thought," composed of pastel, paint, and crayon on wood, manage to place classical portraiture and luminous color � la Lautrec within a graphic, modern-day context. Unfazed by complexity or a narrative approach cloaking hidden meaning, Street creates works that draw in the viewer—be they reminiscent of New Yorker illustrations or of Fifth Avenue's more highfalutin fare. Florida-based Stephen Scott Young's prints from straightforward watercolors, mostly of children in the Bahamas, are also on view. Compared by some to Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, Young does not disappoint with his masterfully-rendered "ordinary people." Claiming to have learned drawing by copying Spiderman comics, Young produces images that veer towards the idealistic and too-sweet at times, but his talent is undeniable.

The Susan Key Galleries' Straight Lines And Faces Are Illusory opens this evening (Jan. 13) with a 6-9 p.m. reception. Richard and Randall Whitehead display painting and B & W and color photography, and if their work doesn't turn you on, you can check out Rand Bradford's ongoing Bridges of Knox County show or the thoughtfully selected antique furniture. An architectural lighting consultant who's authored numerous books on lighting design, Randall has appeared on the Discovery Channel and on HGTV to discuss light's psychological and physical affects. Exhibited in Barcelona (where he lived in the early '80s) and Antwerp (in addition to cities in the U.S.), Richard has employed a variety of painting methods, including utilizing lesser-known "interference acrylics." According to the publication Inksmith, interference pigments are made with the mineral mica and "flip between a bright opalescent color and its complement...similar to naturally occurring light interferences such as [what happens with] oil on water." Luminescent or iridescent paint relies on a reflection of light waves that the brain perceives as refracted color that comes and goes depending on the angle from which it's seen. The abundant Muscovite mica, so-named because Moscow dwellers used it for window panes, is present in paint and the pearly coating on some wallpaper. All that aside, Richard's paintings closely resemble those of Francis Picabia and other cubist-centered abstractionists of the early 1900s. His artist's profile states that his work "...is a continuing experiment in forcing a new dimensionality into flat objects and exploring the evolution of convex to concave...I am not taking my art in a direction, it is leading me." We, too, might find ourselves being led along a stretch of road that offers visual as well as material satisfaction.