Blame it on the weather.

DJ Matheny likes to paint scenes in the Golden Hour, that time in late afternoon when warm light flows over the landscape because of how the angle of the sun's rays are filtered by more of the earth's atmosphere. Early morning light is similar, although often more pinkish. But when Matheny went to the Flint Hills to gather photo reference for paintings last year, it rained the whole time. Instead of focusing on golden light on the prairie, she was faced with dramatic grey clouds.

The artist got the idea to paint these muted colors on silver leaf. She applied gesso to her canvas, painstakingly tiled very thin leaves of silver to the surface, and then sealed the silver leaf to prevent tarnish. Then it was time to paint the subject matter. Matheny used water-soluble oil paint and made the colors run by spraying the wet paint with water in a spray bottle. The colors ran down the canvas, the silver leaf popped through in various places, and a convincing and unforgettable depiction of rain clouds resulted. The effect changes based on what angle the viewer looks at the painting.

Matheny may not return to the subject of rain clouds over the Flint Hills, but the silver leaf effect will likely show up in future paintings. "I want to do some portraits on the silver leaf," says the artist. "I can't remember how I got the idea, but I was interested in getting a sense of luminosity. I am from the East Coast and accustomed to lots of water, so when I moved here, the wide-open areas of the Flint Hills were the closest I could get to looking out over the ocean. I was also interested in the historical importance of the Flint Hills. But previously I focused on the foreground of the painting and the hills--not so much the sky. Here I am focusing on the clouds to create a sense of luminosity. That's where the silver leaf came in."

Matheny's clever use of silver leaf is striking, but it's not the only trick in her bag. Plenty more of her paintings now on display at the R. G. Endres Gallery, in Prairie Village's municipal building, don't have silver leaf as part of their composition, but they offer other treats.

What does Matheny want viewers of her work to experience? "I'm hoping that people will be delighted and inspired by a different way of looking at nature," she says. "People can become desensitized to the beauty of nature. I felt like scales had been lifted from my eyes when I had some design training. It was amazing. And the more I paint, the more I see--nuances in the color of the sky as it nears the horizon, the color of shadows. I see clouds much better now since I have painted them. I found them intriguing, a challenge to portray, a process of discovery."

Matheny's work, along with a hearty selection of pieces by artist John Keeling, are on view at the R. G. Endres Gallery, at City Hall on Mission Road, through March 8 as part of the continuing visual art program from the Prairie Village Arts Council.

People look at school shootings in a number of different ways. Artist and teacher Aimee Fresia, whose work is now showing in the Meadowbrook Park Clubhouse under the auspices of the Prairie Village Arts Council, finds one aspect of school shootings particularly vexing and neglected: the memory of the teachers and staff who died. "Is it that we are all so busy and there's so much media that it gets pushed to the back of our brains?" Fresia asks. "These are normal people who should be remembered and revered for what they did and what happened to them. It's just become so accepted."

Fresia's piece "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us," which depicts 18 victims of school shootings, jumps out at the viewer, the portraits of the 18 people pulling us in. Words painted into the background help tell the story and help cement our interest and curiosity. The portraits themselves are each small works of art, painted on various materials and placed together in a collage of acrylic paint and layered pieces. Crucially, the portraits break down at the bottom of each, disintegrating into bits (or metaphorical bytes) of information.

"Those bits of information are slowly going away," Fresia says. "No one is thinking about what happened in May 2000. No one thinks about the individual cases anymore. They are just disintegrating."

Closer examination of "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us" reveals Fresia's process, but the effect is complicated. It's clear that the making of this piece was painstaking. Fresia says she had to do it in chunks of time because of its emotional intensity. She utilized gelli printing to get some of the effects, and her surfaces ranged from tissue paper to Bristol board to multimedia paper, but her preferred surface was a thin vellum paper. She built each portrait in layers from bare skin to hair to clothing. Her tools were Xacto blades, scissors, acrylic paint, and monoprinting.

And most important, she learned about each one of the victims. "I love research, so I researched how many teachers had died since I started teaching in 2000," says Fresia. "The number was 700, but by the time I painted them, it was more. I was just doing facts--I looked up articles that were factual about violence in America. Old School journalism, no opinions. My thought was that this was all just digital information, all getting lost in the digital arena. It took a long time to research them. Then I thought about what colors I needed. I thought about who each one was as a person. I went to their obituary and in memoriam pages to see who had a dog, what they liked to read, what long vacation they were looking forward to."

Careful viewers may notice that some pieces that make up the collage are dangling, torn, or missing. Fresia is pragmatic about it. "Some of it will be repaired and some of it won't," she says. "I feel like there's a realness to that, but when it comes back from a gallery or show, I make a decision about how much to repair and how much to leave. It is an imperfect situation."

Gun violence can be a polarizing topic, but Fresia says she hasn't gotten much pushback…at least on this piece. Her work does tend toward the topical. The tradition of artists tackling social issues is a long one. "I think it is important, that it is important work. I read in a book that if somebody lives through something terrible, the least you can do is read about it. It's not that much to ask for someone to look at a piece of art for what, ten seconds?

"I try to make art that is more truthful than journalism. I double checked facts--even facts that were sourced from the government," Fresia says. The viewer can sense this. It is part of the power of the piece.

See "Homage to Those Who Went Before Us," along with other pieces by Fresia and work by Lisa Healey and Jean McGuire, at the Clubhouse in Meadowbrook Park, on Nall Avenue at Somerset Drive, through March 8.

Make plans to see the Nov. 6 opening of the newest art show at the R. G. Endres Gallery, in Prairie Village's municipal building--this exhibition features the thought-provoking work of three area artists: Lisa Healey, Aimee Fresia, and Jean McGuire.

Lisa Healey explores the narrative qualities of photography in her work, which can suggest strong emotions behind portraits or mix fantasy elements with reality. "Looking closer at small parts of nature in a big way, through photography, reminds us we are also a small part of this larger world," says Healey. "We rely on our environment so we must consider how to best protect and conserve it."

Aimee Fresia combines painting and collage in her artwork that promotes healing and understanding in a tumultuous world. Her work requires care to both make and to appreciate. "Collage speaks to me with its layering and the time it takes to create each section, each piece and strip put on purposefully and with intention," she says. "I layer things in a way that makes sense to me--realistic landscapes with fleeting leaves or solitary polar bears. I try to capture solitary moments, real or imagined."

Antique photos become modern portraits in the hands of oil painter Jean McGuire. "An interest in antique photos lured me into portrait studies after a 40-year break from my art," says the artist. "I love the faces, the expressions, and the attitudes of these, usually, long-forgotten people. The theme for all of these portraits is the story behind each picture. I love pondering what kind of life each of them had while I am working on their portrait. Each of the pieces in this show was created by using a limited palette to create colors. I was taught in grade school that an artist only needs to use red, yellow, blue, and white to create every color. A background in commercial printing embedded that belief even deeper. I like to break down my paintings into the layers of color you would see if you were color separating a four-color process photograph. I complete this breakdown in my mind, with no computer aids, and it still thrills me to see the depth evolve as the layers go down."

It's easy to visit the exhibition--it's a mere stroll through the municipal building on Mission Road. The current show featuring these three artists will be on view at the R. G. Endres until January, but a choice selection of pieces from the three artists will stay on view at the Meadowbrook Park Clubhouse until March.

A crowd was around one particular painting all evening during the exhibition opening of "State of the Arts" on September 11 at the Prairie Village municipal building. Every show has paintings that are crowd pleasers, but rarely does one piece attract this level of attention. And everybody had questions.

The piece was "Return to Classicism--Portrait of a Lady," by Yeqiang (Ye) Wang, of Topeka, Kansas. Finished in 2022, the oil painting measures 48" x 32" and depicts a woman in 15th Century garb in the window of a modern storefront. People were delighted, fascinated, and curious. To read more about this Best in Show winner, click here.

Other winners included Merit Awards for Shannon Brouk's "Inked" and Michele Sherlock's "Joy." Honorable Mention went to Gloria Gale ("Beautiful Morning"), Tara Karaim ("Becca's Birthday"), Robert Klausing ("Glitch Day"), Peter Morgan ("From Above"), and Michael Schupp ("Birch Forest"). Madison Renn Watson's "Homesickend" won People's Choice.

These and more than 40 more pieces will be on display at R. G. Endres Gallery, in Prairie Village's Municipal Building, through November 1.

A crowd was around one particular painting all evening during the exhibition opening of "State of the Arts" on September 11 at the Prairie Village municipal building. Every show has paintings that are crowd pleasers, but rarely does one piece attract this level of attention. And everybody had questions.

The piece was "Return to Classicism--Portrait of a Lady," by Yeqiang (Ye) Wang, of Topeka, Kansas. Finished in 2022, the oil painting measures 48" x 32" and depicts a woman in 15th Century garb in the window of a modern storefront. People were delighted, fascinated, and curious. Is she a ghost? Is she a dream? Is she a mannequin in a store? Is the artist exploring the idea of seeing? Is he commenting on changes in society over human history? How does he do it with no visible brushstrokes? Why isn't this in a museum? Is she sad? Did AI do this?

Artificial intelligence did not do this. Yeqiang Wang poured more than 500 hours into the creation of this painting. And its genesis comes from a very personal place. "I was new to Western culture when I moved from China at age 33," Ye says. "I was new to this world, and I saw this new culture like you see something through a display window. You can't see everything clearly. In a new culture you see everything partially clear and partially not." So in 2021 when Ye, who recently graduated with an MFA degree from the University of Windsor, in Canada, visited a neighborhood on the nearby Detroit River, he was struck by a reflection of his friend through glass, and pondered its ambiguous meaning. The figure reflected in glass created a there-but-not-there feeling, a crossing of worlds. He had found an artistic direction that felt right to him.

Ye wasn't just exploring the different worlds of East and West. He was also investigating the contrasts between classical painting and modern painting. Photorealism has long kept its place cozily next to abstract art in contemporary painting, and Ye's extensive technical training in China gave him the skills needed to pull off photorealism. He painted his Reflection series for 10 years. It was a hit among collectors, critics, and jurors.

Then he saw a 1993 piece ("Odalisque Express") by fellow photorealist painter Tom Blackwell that depicted a poster of an Ingres painting in a storefront window, and Ye had a new idea. He would paint models in costume depicting classical paintings through glass in an urban setting, creating a contrast that asks questions and offers slender few answers, all of them leaning toward the universality of human nature even as human culture changes dramatically. He was excited, but the road in front of him was going to be long.

The new series would be called Return to Classicism. Ye started taking photos for the series in 2012. "Return to Classicism--Young Girl Reading" and "Return to Classicism--Lais of Corinth" came first, then he began the painting that would win Best in Show at the State of the Arts show hosted by the Prairie Village Arts Council, "Return to Classicism: Portrait of a Lady." That award-winning piece owed some of its power to a visit to Walmart.

"I found that model in Walmart and introduced myself in the checkout line," Ye says. "She looked like the figure in the painting, so I asked her if she would be a part of the project. I asked for a phone number and she said, 'No!' I said I understood, but that I would be in downtown Topeka at 5pm with another model and she could come see the photo shoot. The next day she and her friend came over and watched. She was a high-schooler, not even 18, and her mom said she needed to meet me and sign a contract. Later, after the girl saw us shooting photos, her mom said she didn't need to meet me in person. Just bring over contract to sign. I was very happy with the second photo shoot. This is my favorite among all because I was very happy with the photo."

He hired two tailors to make the costumes based on classical paintings. He hired people to help him make the tables, pottery, and jewelry to match the objects in the master works. In the case of Ye's Best in Show painting, the classical inspiration was "Portrait of a Lady" by Rogier van der Wyeden (1400-1464). Ye also had to make a piece of glass to serve as the reflective window integral to his concept, and it had to be portable so he could set up his composition for reference photographs in Topeka city streets.

"The furniture I had to make myself," says the artist. "It's a long preparation and very time consuming. The pose needs to be as close to the original painting as possible, and the glass has to be able to get moved around and angled perfectly. And it has to be photographed on a sunny day or the reflection would not be right. Sometimes we had to shoot five or six times. If the photo was not perfect, I would not even start the painting. It wouldn't be worth it."

Early on, Ye received crucial support from his employer, Dodge City Community College, and then money from his next employer, Washburn University, for the research project that would become the Return to Classicism series. Ye worked on the three paintings over four years, and when he showed them to the world in 2017, the acclaim was immediate. People loved the new series. It received national attention. Ye was not satisfied. "It was in a lot of exhibitions, but every time it came back, I would adjust it somewhat, in small places, here and there," he says. "You cannot do this too fast." It took him 550 hours to paint "Return to Classicism--Portrait of a Lady." So while that $25,000 price tag on the painting may make it an unlikely stocking stuffer gift for most of us, it is a bargain considering how many hours were poured into it. "Classicism is about perfection. I call it a return to classicism," Ye says simply.

It's also a study in contrast, as mentioned earlier--these painting series explore the differences between modern painting and classicism, but also Western culture and Chinese culture. Ye's approach is nuanced and balanced. He is forced to reckon with how his background and training is different than what is prevalent in North America, and how his technical training is lost on many art teachers in the West. On the other hand, finding models that look like the Europeans depicted in classical paintings is much easier in Topeka than in Chengdu. Like Ye, the centuries-old models in the classical paintings are displaced--in time.

"The glass functions as time travel," Ye says. "The glass in front of the camera reflects things behind me. These reflections are modern urban life, billboards, cars, signs, and people in modern clothes. It's a striking contrast, and you also feel like you are traveling through a time tunnel. It is a mysterious and interesting thing. It breaks the perfection of a perfect image. I'm deconstructing and reconstructing a figure in a classical structure. Deconstruction is an important idea of modern art."

The modern, urban setting is the key. "If I purely reconstructed a classical image, I still might have a good painting, but it is not as interesting. When you introduce modern life, it generates a power."

It is a powerful structure, built brick by painstaking brick. "My paintings are done section by section," Ye says. "I don't touch every part of the canvas at the same time. I focus on one part at a time. I might paint the headpiece for two or three days, just two to three square inches a day. I push myself very hard for details. If I paint all around, I lose the focus on the details--one could accept what has already been painted and move on. I was taught to raise up all levels to completion … but I do it differently."

The surface of Ye's prize-winning painting is glossy and smooth, with virtually no sign of the painter's hand. It's an amazing technical achievement, one that makes even the most casual viewer pause. Ye shrugs. "People only look at the result," he says. "If the result looks good, it really doesn't matter how you made it. Some people would be interested in how you made it, and some would be curious how you achieved your results. But a bowl of rice is a lot of tiny parts. Don't be greedy, do it little by little. When you are anxious, you are greedy, and you want to speed it up … and you screw up in a lot of places and end up spending more time."

Perhaps 550 hours is enough.

by Bob Bahr, Prairie Village Arts Council member

Robert Klausing has the skills and vision to pursue an artistic idea in very different directions, thanks to his facility in acrylic painting, pastels and watercolor. These three media handle very differently, with watercolor being a somewhat unruly way of painting with water and pigment wanting to pool and run across the paper, acrylic drying quickly and opaquely, and pastel acting as a hybrid between drawing and painting.

Parents know that each child needs to be raised differently; teachers know that each student brings a unique set of needs for learning. Perhaps the part of Klausing's personality that allowed him to be a high-school and middle-school teacher and coach for years is the same part of his brain that allows him to smoothly work with various materials.

His pastels jump out at the viewer, partly because of the energy in his strokes with these pigment sticks, and in part because of the vibrancy of pastel's colors. Klausing does move from medium to medium, but he focused mostly on pastel for years for pragmatic reasons. "One of the reasons I got into pastel was because it was immediate," he says. "I didn't have to wait for it to dry or worry about all the processes involved like with oil paints. Anyway, there wasn't the time to spend on a large acrylic or oil painting. I had seen some pastel pieces and really enjoyed them. Pastel has been around for a long time; Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Edgar Degas, among others, proved it was a legitimate fine-art medium. I can do one fast if I don't have a lot of time to put into a painting."

"I enjoy the energy of linework, so pastel is very conducive to the way that I like to work," Klausing continues. "Pastel can be very linear. I like to use strokes to suggest form, sort of a tight impressionism. But you can blend pastel with a rag, your finger, et cetera if you want to create a surface that is pristine. I've always enjoyed more of a loose, expressive style. And I am always aware of the visual effects of light and its characteristics, of the effect of light in different conditions. Pastel really lends itself to expressing that light. And there is a visual energy that comes from pastel. I think people respond to that."

While an artist can smudge two pastel colors together, they don't blend the same way as a liquid medium. Instead, pastelists often put different colored strokes from pastel sticks next to each other to allow the colors to blend in the viewer's eye. In oil paint, a similar approach was made by Georges Seurat in the 1880s. Seurat's method, dubbed pointillism, consisted of a painstaking application of dots of color, with all of the colors blending in the viewer's eye. Some modern printing processes utilize a similar approach.

"If I am painting in acrylic, I can blend those colors ahead of time," Klausing says. "In pastel, I may make hatch marks with a blue, then layer hatch marks of yellow on top to create the green that I want. I have hundreds of colors of pastel so I can get most colors. But if a green is not dark enough, I can use color underneath it to get it darker. When you can't find the color you want in your pastel sticks you have to think about how to make them."

Klausing works on pastel paper that's a neutral beige or light tan. His paper has a lot of tooth to grab the pastel. With care, that tooth allows several layers (Klausing says up to four) to build up before getting slick and full. He starts with hard pastels, sometimes brushing the shapes at this early stage in painting with a bit of mineral spirits to work the pigment into the paper while leaving most of the tooth unfilled, ready for more layers. Softer pastels are applied last, with the delicate pigment sitting on top of previous layers with clean, brilliant color. He sometimes uses pastel pencils at the very end for fine details.

Painting with pastel sticks is a very direct way to paint--your hand is on the pigment; your hand is directly applying the paint. There is no brush handle to create distance between artist and artwork. It makes a big difference, especially in regard to control. But lately, Klausing has focused on painting with watercolor, the medium of his senior exhibition in high school. "I'm going through a watercolor phase right now," he says. "Pastel is so controlled. The spontaneity of watercolor can carry some of the energy of the painting. So I bounce back and forth between the two media." Acrylic is the middle child, with more control than the mercurial watercolor, and less control than pastel. Klausing says he puts down washes of color in acrylic in a manner similar to how one would in watercolor, then as the painting develops, his strokes become more like pastel marks, albeit with acrylic paint and brush. Watercolor, acrylic, pastel--in a sense, Klausing is trilingual. That's not for the faint of heart.

Wait--we forgot to mention that Klausing also throws clay to create ceramic works of art. Perhaps that's for another day.

​By Bob Bahr, Prairie Village Arts Council member

You may be familiar with the display of art in the halls of the Prairie Village municipal building, where exhibitions curated by the Prairie Village Arts Council showcase talent from the KC metropolitan area, with an emphasis on our town. But another venue, with even more attractive gallery space, presents a healthy handful of work by the same featured artists.

​By Bob Bahr, PV Arts Council member
 
The municipal offices for Prairie Village are in the heart of our relatively quiet and leafy neighborhood, but its residents and other artists outside our immediate environs have their eyes--and camera lenses--pointed much further afield. This is on view right now in the Art of Photography show in the R. G. Endres Gallery, at City Hall. The juror for this exhibition, which featured more than $3,000 in prize money, appreciated the wide scope of the qualifying entries. "I was surprised by the great variety of submissions, with motifs from all over the world--perhaps every continent except Antarctica," said Philipp Eirich, co-owner of Cerbera Gallery, located in Kansas City's Crossroads neighborhood.

More than 45 artists contributed more than 50 photographs to the exhibition, which will be on view at the municipal offices through July 6. Their submissions were divided into three categories: People & Portraits of People, Landscapes & Architecture, and Abstract/Non-traditional/Photo-collaged/Highly digitally enhanced. Winners in each category receive a $500 prize. The R. G. Endres Best of Show award earns the winner $750. Additionally, six pieces receive Honorable Mention awards worth $200.

Eirich said not only were about four entries within a point of each other at the top of his judging tally, but even the initial culling of all the entries to winnow them down small enough to exhibit was difficult and close, with only a few submissions clearly not making the grade. "It was really impressive," Eirich said. "Even the photos that did not make it into the show were of high quality. Not making it into a show does not mean it is a bad image, it's just there is limited gallery space available. It is so subjective, especially with a single judge, not a panel."

​The six Honorable Mention awards went to "Ground Gears," by Brittany Buchanan; "Generational Colors in Peru," by Jessica Frieze; "Toucher le Fond," by Robin Blochlinger; "Balcony Shadows," by Paul Middleton; "Pritzker Pavilion," by Steve Anderson; and "At Alison's," by Steve Wilson.

At the opening reception for the show, visitors voted on the People's Choice award, with Lauren Kinne's "Big Sur Portal" winning the honor and the $500 prize.

by Bob Bahr, PV Arts Council member

The trio of artists now showing at the R. G. Endres Gallery, in the Prairie Village Municipal Offices, stimulate the mind in very different ways. It's highly unlikely that a visitor could see this show, on view until May 4, and not be pulled in by at least one of the approaches presented.

Bryce Holt believes that artists are storytellers, and the majority of the pieces by him on display are inspired by books in the Old Testament. His straightforward, graphic approach leaves the viewer with the not-so-simple task of connecting the images with some knowledge of the scriptures. The sheer size of his acrylic paintings fills the eye with bold statements.
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From left: "Mama I'm Coming Home," by Bryce Holt, acrylic, 48 x 36 in.;
"Dice Game," by Bryce Holt, acrylic, 48 x 36 in.