Big impression

Winter is the big time for small art. Black Mountain Center for the Arts just took down their annual miniatures show, and American Folk on Biltmore just put theirs up. Down in Brevard, the Drew Deane Gallery is exhibiting miniatures by eight regional artists.

Like its current small works, the Drew Deane Gallery bears close inspection. Its namesake painter bought the old firehouse/town hall on Brevard’s Main Street, and has approached her venture with vision and integrity. Deane’s own work has dealt for some time with the American roadside motel and neon sign—images that resonate for her because she grew up in Silver Springs, Fla., spending time with three spinster aunts who owned the Camellia Motel. “I couldn’t wait for dark,” she recalls, “when I [would see] the neon sign come on.”

Her winter show features pieces by both new and established artists. Annie Weiler displays a mixed-media series collectively titled “Journey to Wholeness.” Her colors are oranges and blue-greens; the pale shapes undulate uncertainly through the pieces, marking a difficult and nebulous path.

Greenville, S.C., printmaker Mark Mulfinger presents several etchings, casual and almost offhand figurative depictions. “Coffee Underground,” after a Greenville cafe by that name, comments on today’s near-religious embrace of the title beverage. Meanwhile, a series of loose, immediate watercolors by Martin Tatarka highlights one of our own city’s landmarks—the Biltmore House—but they are not, thank God, the usual grandiose, “tourists will love this” kind of paintings. His “Ironweed at Biltmore” suggests more than a passing interest in botany. 

Constance Humphries’ minimal figures are strange and intriguing. Their heads and bodies have volume, but the extremities are those of stick figures. Humphries manages to create a great deal of emotion with very little detail. In “Untitled #10,” a lightly sketched female figure stands in a gray rectangle, looking slightly depressed. The only color in the work comes from an orange crown on her head and a dark-red dot denoting the big toenail on her left foot.

Three pieces by longtime Warren Wilson teacher Dusty Benedict are clearly those of a mature artist. The mixed-media works done in ink, gesso and graphite exhibit a richness that seldom comes except through long experience. Called “Hibiscus Series,” they boast sweeping, rhythmic shapes and echo the delicacy of the tropical flowers they represent.

But back to Western North Carolina: Depressing as it may be for longtime residents to drive through the once pristine, now overdeveloped Mills River Valley, it’s worth a trip to Brevard to see this gallery and this exhibit.

[Connie Bostic is an Asheville-based painter and writer.]