Saoirse reviews Van’s Wild West Gallery:

Located on the Monissius SIM is a large art gallery owned and operated by Van Caerndow called “Van’s Wild West Gallery”. Our artist also owns a gallery near the Hotel Chelsea [VC Now Gallery] that is much smaller than this gallery with about 12 images at any given time. His specialty? Portraits of avatars on commission. TerryLynn Melody nicknamed him “the Cowboy Van Gogh” and many in world know him from his resident name. It is exciting to review the work of someone accomplished in both worlds. I have provided his first life art information below this review.

His partner, Yanne Proudfoot and he have a lovely spot to sit and relax in the backyard of the gallery. This spot has a view of the sea and they have set out all the amenities blankets, a few chairs, and near to the artist’s rocking chair, some lovely bales of hay to sit on complete with pitchfork and a horse nearby. After I walked through the gallery, I sat here to write, drinking one of the Wahne Tahiti Beers that reminded me I was thirsty. I love the interactive quality of some food and drink in world, chatting me up.

The artist works exclusively with first life materials. The artist uses Pebeo paint on glass creating all images in first life. All these images are then professionally scanned so he may make prints to bring in world. He has been working recently with acrylic on canvasses where he textures the canvas first then creates the image. One of the amazing aspects is that he doesn’t use any software in the creation of his portraits. The artist uses opaque and translucent paints to achieve the effect he is looking for with the image.

Arriving at the gallery, I stepped back and took a fly by overheard. The colors from the artist’s images can be seen from quite a distance. I recommend viewing the gallery images in a daytime light and midnight light. Straight away, when I entered the gallery, I was full of ideas of what I wanted to write about here today. Set up in a graduated upward moving circle, walking through the wide open hallways is pleasurable. I am struck by how these images look unique to me in a way I couldn’t have defined earlier. It is the Pebeo paint on glass effect, you can see some brush strokes here and there. It is quite a lovely effect and I can see how the artist easily made enough money to maintain this SIM for a long time.

Specializing in portraits, the artist has many images that are not of figures. On the first landing there is a smartly done image of Wrigley Field [famous American baseball field in Chicago]. The artist has detailed the area around the feet of the people awaiting entry to Wrigley Field in bright red. This detail balances the image nicely keeping the eye moving around to aspects other than the famous sign of the stadium. The sign itself is well done, not an easy feat working with paint of glass surface. Glass surface is unforgiving with no resistance to the brush strokes. All moment is carefully controlled by the artist.

There is a pumpkin to sit against on the first floor, I love a place to sit and write in the gallery. Halloween coming up it seems a shame no one will be sitting on the pumpkin at that time. His images are quite varied so this artist cannot be called simply a portrait artist, and his work is far from simple. One of his newer images is a spiderweb with colors surrounding the images. Painting a spiderweb on a glass medium takes a steady focused hand to create. This image has colors moving inward, playfully, scattered about in an orderly but not linear fashion. A spider is most commonly viewed with dark images and negative connotations. Not with this artist, the spider’s web is fun and inviting making me recall the Charlotte’s web tale by E.B.White [also author of Stuart Little].