Exhibit Captures the Art of the Island

By Erin Keever
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, January 11, 2007

Some paintings are as much about the act of painting as anything else. This is the case with Christopher Schade's "Islands" at D Berman Gallery.

Schade, a former American-Statesman correspondent, toys with our idea of an "island," or land mass surrounded by water, by visually breaking the island apart. Painted sections of various blues with lines indicating waves are easily detected, as are fragments of craggy land formations. However, these shapes are arranged around voids. Natural and mechanical imagery spills out over each 6-by-6-foot painting, continually changing while creating unusual spatial relationships.

Look carefully, and two similar yet distinct styles emerge. Put simply, one is more loosely painted and focuses on fewer, larger and often distorted organic forms. The tighter style, seen in works such as "Colossus Island," can be characterized by complex compositions that include additional elements such as patterns and stripes.

In the latter, Schade uses too many colors to count. His brilliant palette bursts into bits before our eyes; swaths of pink swarm up to tangerines as icy blues cool next to mossy greens.

Schade says, "I want the world in the paintings to coma apart and rebuild itself the way the real world does." What a wonderful process to watch.

("Christopher Schade: Islands" continues through Feb 17, D Berman Gallery)

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" Wait and Hope: New Works by Katy O'Connor"/"Restless Timber: New Works by Jennifer Drummond"
Volitant Gallery, through Feb. 10

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
Friday, January 12, 2007

The show currently at Downtown's brightly expansive Volitant Gallery features the work of two artists, Katy O'Connor and Jennifer Drummond, in a pairing that works so well, you might get the urge to gather some friends and have a picnic in the woods by way of celebration. You might decide to do this every day for a week, so inspirationally successful is this two-woman show, and you might want to invite the artists along for the fun.

O'Connor, armed with microfine pen and a palette of oil paints so varied that it'd make a rainbow seem gray, would capture the picnic's people as she captures the brightly clad inhabitants of the paintings in her "Wait and Hope" part of this double exhibition. She wouldn't go for the hyperrealism you might see elsewhere, where the illusion of reality (seemingly without an intermediary) provides a frisson of awe; rather, she'd render near-life-sized snapshots of the people in action and at rest, and she'd do this with oils on paper or canvas, oils often thinned toward watercolor consistency, and allow the choreography of visible brushstrokes to provide as much interest and delight as her accuracy of depiction.

Thus has she created her show's title piece, Wait and Hope, a moment stopped in time at a tennis court, with a ball hanging in the air and the players poised to strike it or return the volley, and From Here to There, in which a man, sprawled on his back on a bed, reaches both hands to encompass the swollen belly of a pregnant woman standing at the bedside. These impressively large pieces and others -- including a series of smaller figurative scenes done with ink and marker on paper -- are candid shots of humanity, linked only by their intimacy and the millefleur swirl of colors of their subjects' clothes and surroundings.

And when you, at this picnic in the woods, look up from the communal plate of Brie, you might notice that Jennifer Drummond has been concentrating exclusively on capturing the surrounding trees and using only ink and an extremely precise brush. So it is in her "Restless Timber" part of the show: leafless oaks in close-up detail, the gnarls and whorls and brittle corrugations of their bark, the frozen terpsichore of their twisted trunks and limbs, limned in sumi ink on sheet after sheet of expertly framed archival paper. (There's also a series of three vertical panels, called Oak Noir, rendered white-on-black via scratchboard work no less stunning than Drummond's brushwork. And your reviewer wants it.)

What makes the two artists' creations hang so well together are both the contrasts and the easily imagined progression between them. O'Connor's eye-jarring explosions of color give way to Drummond's monochrome line treatments; the humanity of "Wait and Hope" is fully absent from the stark arboretum of "Restless Timber." But Drummond's oaks so often resemble people, the tangles and thrusts of timber are so reminiscent of human form -- and the artist reinforces this with titles like The Grove Harlot, Ancient Gymnast, and Deformed Beauty -- that they seem very like the young subjects of O'Connor's paintings with their clothes removed and their once-supple bodies wracked and intricately wrinkled by age.

Seeing this show may, through sheer enjoyment of excellent work well-presented, forestall your own fate in that regard, dear reader, if only by a few fleeting years.

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"Christopher Schade: Islands"
D Berman Gallery, through Feb. 17

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
Friday, January 26, 2007

It's not often that my initial response to a painting is a feeling of seasickness, but that's exactly how I felt standing in front of Christopher Schade's Colossus Island (2005). Fields of choppy sea, night sky, and pure pattern appear to converge in a vortex that is just beginning to spin out of control. In the foreground of the 6-foot-by-6-foot canvas looms a surreal creature that could be a robot, an alien, or a landmass come to life. It lunges, weightless, through a strange landscape made up of the stuff of this world – ocean, earth – or else a parallel universe that actually consists of paint. If we suspend our disbelief while standing in a gallery, we could arguably make this observation about any painting. In Schade's case, however, the impression seems particularly apt, as the works included in "Islands" are, above all else, paintings about painting.

"Islands" is Schade's first solo show at D Berman Gallery and a homecoming for the New York-based artist, who was a fixture on the Austin art scene in the years following his graduation from Yale University with an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking in 1997. (Schade received a B.A.A. from UT-Austin in 1995.) The seven large paintings, along with some smaller works on paper, bring us up to date as they span the years since Schade moved away. The paintings also indicate an accelerating spatial fragmentation in the "Islands" series, from the spindly figure that dominates the reddish-peach ground in Shifting Island (2003) to the multiple, curved horizon lines and patterned planes of Colossus Island.

Schade plays with illusion in unexpected ways, jolting the viewer out of her absorption into the scene depicted in the painting and returning her back to the surface of the canvas, to the paint. In Shifting Island, what appears to be a straightforward figure-ground relationship between creature and landscape is interrupted by an incline in the ocean horizon, which jogs up a bit behind the creature's three-pronged foot and then completely changes color at the edge of the canvas. The creature in Colossus Island plunges one leg into a roiling gray sea while appearing to perch another just on the water's surface. The disorientation caused by this inconsistency is further heightened with the appearance of a creaturely arm behind another field of sea, this one a muddy green. Once such details become apparent, each painting must be viewed again, this time with an eye toward their artificiality. The complete break in the sliver of seascape at the bottom of Spinning Island (2004) tells us that this long, thin rectangle may look like the sea, but it is also a shape made by paint on a canvas.

Charting these developments is one of the pleasures of the show, although I question the inclusion of a few canvases like Open Island (2005) and Sun Island (2005), which seem much less resolved. The space in Open Island is so jumbled that the fun of picking up on small details I found in other paintings is totally lost. If Open Island and Sun Island are transitional works, perhaps their omission would have made for a much tighter exhibition. Still, there is much to be found in "Islands" that will delight. I say look, and then look again.

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