Summer gets cooler at Space125
Danielle Stillman
Issue date: 8/28/07 Section: A & E
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Wharton native Beth Secor is a professor and artist living in the Houston area. Her six paintings and one embroidery piece were created from the same subject matter and in the same style - a flowing, whorled approach reminiscent of the impressionist era. Secor, an avid collector of photographs, breathed new life into her old photos - some of her family and others of a black family.
Looking at Secor's paintings is like looking at family portraits through warped glass. The poses and smiles give away that they were once photographs, but the rest is abstraction. Color equalizes the images; while some may be based on vintage photographs and others on modern ones, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. Her subjects are women and children: a black boy in a suit jacket, a baby in the bath and her own daughter, giving viewers a newly toothless smile.
Secor's embroidery piece blends seamlessly into the paintings and looks almost identical to the painting next to which it is hung. The piece is mounted on an old mattress cover, but otherwise it is hard to discern which piece is embroidered.
Mark Cervenka's large-scale paintings are portraits of everyday interactions with dramatic flair. His theatrical sense of composition and lighting creates tense and mysterious scenes. The simply titled "House" features an elderly man sitting at what could be a kitchen table with shadows dramatically covering half his face. A young boy sleeps peacefully in an adjacent room, seen through a doorway. The mood is melancholy and peaceful, all at once.
"The Observers" is a tableau of three women, each with a beaker. Two of them are sitting at a table, with one of them writing a letter, another gazing into the beaker, vessel held high above her head. A third woman enters the space from another room, holding her own container. The curious manner in which the women interact with the beakers invites the viewers to create their own backstory. Cervenka's awareness of the remarkable in ordinary situations translates well into these two fascinating paintings.