Kultivate Arts

Saoirse reviews The Smakager Gallery of Art:

The logo for the Gallery of Art is a rainbow design.  The logo is burlesque type females and this is the only place you will see this style at the gallery’s current installation.  Miss Snape aka Cookie has created some surreal images that gave me a wonderful visual treat.  The gallery is under construction and opening soon.  There are many images to view here now.  The music track is a German station and the songs played are sung in English and German.  Lighting : Any inside venue.

There is but one self portrait, an exquisite design black and white.  Dressed in black from hat to high heel, this portrait gives me the most intimate viewing of our artist.  Neat jeweled necklace below pouty lips and dark eyes, her hair moving in the breeze.  This could easily be taken as a picture from first life.  Her moniker, Snape, perhaps after the fictional character from the Harry Potter series.  Snape is a cold, sarcastic, intelligent wizard who fumes with barely concealed contempt and resentment.  With the book series, he develops and reveals a richer layer in his interactions with the main character.  Always interested in the artist as well as the art, I consider this name choice which may be unrelated to Harry Potter or any other series.  I can tell that the artist is watching the world around her.  Watching the world and believing she has concealed her thoughts is what this portrait appears to say to me.  Lovely image to view.

Many of the gallery images are surreal and colorful.  There is a departure from that theme as a few images of are city and of bridge scenes.  Next to her self portrait is a surreal in primary colors.  For those who have long since forgotten their box of crayons, the primary colors are Red, Blue and Yellow, secondary colors are Purple, Green and Orange.  This image has a discreet roughly paneled or city scape background.  Each primary color defines some part of this image.  The red is kisses laid over to one side.  There is a stencil in black at the center.  The blue is the city scape out a window.   Yellow is a delightfully misty fog in the left foreground.  It comes together nicely to form this image holistic and real.

I moved from the self portrait to the guest table where the exhibit begins.  I enjoy the piece ‘Everyday Struggle’ that greats me as I walk into the main gallery.  This image uses colors twisting around a center line not around an object.  The artist uses a fine circular pattern that is barely noticeable in both halves emanating from the center of the canvas.  One side is brownish red but not to the point of Sepia coloring.  The other side faces it diagonally with teal and white coloring.  Along the middle division are thick rich black strokes, as if made by a large brush, other small black lines have more flow and slight spiral.  A nice image to ponder whilst standing in the gallery.

Sometimes I see a prevailing pattern that an artist uses which shifts with emotion and with each image.  I see some similarities here in the mostly bright selection of colors as well as an interlocking chain pattern.  This pattern intrigues me moving through some of the images.  There are wonderful movements of the color in large arches and circular patterns across the canvas.  Not all the lines are curvy strokes, some are linear and rigid in contrast.  Most of the images contain a pattern or a focus with a theme running through it.  One image ‘Animal Pattern’ has round distinctive cat eyes with closely detailed feline pupils.  On these eyes the artist dusts them with upward strokes of bright red in faux lashes.  The more I study the images, the more I believe that there are also words buried in places, perhaps within the chain like object.  This ‘chain’ has a pattern that is drawn out and not obvious.  The artist takes comfort with this chain in each image as we watch her colors and her imagination dance around.

The artist takes a futuristic approach to the city images included in the installation.  Smartly located in a room off the main gallery, the focus here is on the city scape and the bridges.  The bridge images displayed the artist has used Sepia coloring with diffuse edges.  I am curious, did the artist do city scape and bridges before and move to abstracts or is our artist moving into the city scape and bridge area of expression?  Both bridges are picturesque and angled, keep the bridge concept in mind as the gallery tour wraps up.

I loved walking around these abstracts and arriving at two images full of color, clarity and optimism.  One has a focal point of a silhouetted bridge similar to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransisco.  Three planets are in the sky above, one planet is a curious lovely teal.  The Mists and colors are warmly yellow, pink and red hues.  The other image is equally optimistic with teal featured as the predominate color, the frame etched in neon green.  Within this image is a bike and a woman, first life picture, arms flung behind her in joy.

As I finish spending a wonderful afternoon at the Gallery of Art I read the artist notecard.  She is Danish working with art in sl for about a year.  The artist began work in Paris sl and relocated very recently to this location.  Come and visit her gallery, enjoy the progression of her art experience.  Artfully Yours, Saoirse Heart