Artworks

Artworks has a juried show called Trains, Planes and Automobiles that I saw last week when I re-visited radius250 and did the Sculpture Invitational walk.

The highlights were the four paintings and video by Mike Keeling. Keeling works at the Richmond Airport as an airplane mechanic for Million Air and somehow got not only permission to use the runway for an afternoon but was also given the use of a Learjet and a pilot. He set up large panels on the runway behind the jet and flung paint from buckets and brushes into the super hot and powerful jet exhaust stream. He was the only one allowed to get anywhere near the jet but he had friends and helpers who chose the colors and just took what was handed to him and flung it. The video is FANTASTIC. Like that Picasso painting movie or the Pollock photographs plus he is STRUGGLING to hold onto the panels or buckets and brushes and the hot wind is WHIPPING. It's like a very very intense tennis game and there is a Buster Keaton comic element to it. Comic and heroic and athletic and mythic, referencing all sorts of painting history. It was really great.

I also liked -

Joe Delulio - Small painting with a bendy wavy plane, cartoony and fluid. Made with ease.
Liz Jones - Painting of an ice-clear blue swamp truck.
Virginia Godfrey - Amateurish but nice painting of an old jalopy in a field.
Ron Jensen - Sweet painting of a steam shovel in the city. Reminds me of that children's book.
Bob Procida - Small painting of a blocky crashing race car. Absolutely no sense of movement or context. Wouldn't know what it is except for the tire that has flown off and perhaps the number twelve painted on the crushed can of a roof. Sort of like a Marsden Hartley.
Yoko Gushi - Outsiderish work on paper of a rainbow-like railroad track and a female figure dreaming beneath/beside it.

RELATED: Style Weekly article - with small photo - on Mike Keeling.