Art Trek, August 8, 2023
This week, with the help of Martin A. David, we took in three galleries.
~Commentary by Martin A. David~
~Photos by Dana Nöllsch~
From a collection of sketches from many gifted artists to a highly skilled artist showing his imagination and mastery of his craft, and lastly, a young woman whose art celebrates femininity astonishingly.
So join us on this Art Trek, August 8, 2023
The Reno art scene grows by the hour. If you need proof of that bold statement, take a stroll to some of the dozens of art galleries, art spaces, and semi-hidden art niches that fill our fair city.
The Artists Co-op
A prime example is the 60-year-old Artists Co-op of Reno on Mill Street, at the corner of Wells. The edifice’s outside is deceptively nondescript when one considers the candy store for the eyes and mind you encounter when entering. The building, originally constructed to house an exclusive French Laundry and repurposed as an art center in 1966, is filled to the seams with art of every description.
The current show, Drawing on Inspiration, features an exciting range of drawings by members of the co-op. Bold and broad strokes find themselves at home next to delicate and draftsman-like lines. The other rooms of the unique arts mansion are crammed full of paintings, drawings, jewelry, ceramics, and sculptures that would take volumes to describe. Guest artist Blair Latos is given a wall to display her dense studies of outdoor images.
627 Mill St Reno
Open seven days a week – 11 am – 4 pm
WYLD Market
Not far away, in the Wyld Collective Market of the Reno Public Market building, another kind of visual adventure awaits the viewer. The featured artist is Braighlee, a highly-skilled painter whose thematic explorations could best be described as “femininity writ large.” The term feminism has been overloaded with extraneous meanings and implications in our time, but Braighlee’s work cuts through the inessential and the unimportant and gets to the point of understanding what it means to be a woman.
There is nothing didactic or overtly political about her joyous paintings. They just make their various points by being themselves. As the artist herself expresses it, “the balance is the art of creating versus the art of showing.” Her creations, particularly the older canvasses in the chronological exhibition, combine dexterously crafted images of faces, bodies, body parts, flowers, and fruits with wild and almost giddy, bleeding lines that cascade down the canvasses.
The more recent works, representatives of her study residency in Rome, still contain the poetry and exuberance of her earlier paintings but bring forth a different aspect of the feminine theme. They include powerful portraits of Jane Goodall, Freda Kahlo, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
299 E Plumb Lane #175, Reno
NFA Gallery
If you’ve never explored the compact art cave that lurks below the surface of Reno’s magnificent art supply emporium, Nevada Fine Arts, you owe yourself that voyage. Now would be a particularly good time to go since the current exhibition is devoted to the amazing variety of artistic visions by masterful artist Paul Manktelow. The show is called Shades of Paul Manktelow. However, a magazine article that hangs with the work offers Moods of Paul Manktelow as another way of thinking about the works.
The artist, with his impeccable technique….or one should say techniques…dances from fantasy to realism and back again. His series of miniature watercolors of country scenes never falter in their depictions. The humor behind his fantasy faces—some with well-crafted sculptural additions—shows its menacing side as soon as you dare look away. Some of the artist’s older work, such as the brooding piece The Miner, tell haunting tales of the British working class—a theme he has explored over the years. His highly textured canvas, Midnight at Orchard Farm, drew this viewer back again and again to see the image of a very human-looking cat in the costume of an aging grandmother standing and gazing out at a country meadow gate.
1301 S. Virginia, Reno
Mon-Sat: 10 am – 6 pm
Sunday: 11 am – 5 pm
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