MacGlaughlin, the guest artist for the month, fills his mixed-media collages with emotion-invoking color and high energy.
In "Improvisation," one of his most cheerful works, asymmetrical squares and rectangles in a wide variety of bright colors appear to dance across the canvas, occasionally revealing faces reminiscent of the covers of 80s pop albums. The result has all the loose freedom of an improvised jam session, the visual representation of a calypso number pouring across the canvas.
A darker piece of MacGlaughlin's is "Shrill," where faded images of screaming, movie-style women peer out from claustrophobically thin bars of color. Smaller black and green stripes streak across the front like censor bars, framing the women's frightened eyes and making them seem to almost leap off the page.
Durrant's art pieces, on the other hand, are subtler, metal-based evocations of the outside world.
Though bright greens, coppers and silvers can shine out, it's the softer, more mutable colors that end up inviting the longest looks. In "A Happy Accident" the color is itself the art, creating small pulsating gold and silver suns that need almost no other adornment.
In "Take Off," bubbles of gold and blue on a wash of silver look almost like clouds, with a turn of the head turning a dark brown ridge into a mountain range stretching out beneath. Turn your head the other direction, how-ever, and the silvery blue becomes water and radically transforms the painting.
Texture is almost as dramatic an element as the color. In "Untitled #6," crinkled metal canyons are washed in paint to sharpen and bring out each bump and ridge. In "Nina," deep green and copper furrows bring to mind rich, freshly plowed earth waiting for new life.
A life, most likely, made up of squares and curved lines.
jwardell@davisclipper.com
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