For her most current entire body of do the job, Clintonville artist Kelly Reichert drew from a deep area.
In an exhibit on watch at the Highline Espresso Art Space’s North Window Gallery — a window exhibiting artworks to all those who wander by the Highline Coffee Co. in Worthington — Reichert pays tribute to her previous artwork professor at Otterbein University, the late Joanne Stichweh. The show carries on by way of Feb. 28.
Stichweh, who died in 2019, had established a sequence of pastel items featuring fish motifs that Reichert rediscovered when she was assisting her mentor clean out her studio.
“When we went via that, she gave me all these slides,” Reichert reported. “I place them in the slide viewer, and it was all the fish collection.”
As a way to accept her mentor, Reichert made use of fish imagery as a leaping-off position for the new series of combined-media creations. From there, the artist let her creativeness run wild, incorporating other influences — like pop art, medieval artwork and both equally Christian and non-Western representations of fish — into the ultimate pieces, which make use of acrylic paint, pastel, chalk, material patterns and even glitter.
“Whatever functions for me, functions,” Reichert claimed of her vast assortment of components. “I don’t treatment if it’s large-dollar paint, or no matter whether it is some affordable, weird things I located in the clearance bin.”
Viewers who wander by the window gallery might not know the backstory, but that’s Alright with the artist.
“I just want (my art) to be ready to stand by yourself if you don’t know something about anything at all,” she reported. “Walking by, on the way to get your coffee — I want it to operate on that amount.”
It does.
All of the pieces on check out feature plump, colourful fish versus elaborately patterned backgrounds, but just about every specific do the job is distinct in its unique properties.
Some parts depict the fish in what seems to be their organic habitat, like the bold “Upward Motion”: The get the job done capabilities a fish outlined in blue and colored in orange as it appears to be to leap out of the h2o earlier an assortment of leafy green vegetation.
On the other hand, the pink fish noticed in “If It is Also Insistent, It Wrecks The Balance” looks to inhabit an fully summary area: The fish is framed by an ornate assortment of designs, together with bins in pink, squiggly strains in gold and rosy floral designs that counsel wallpaper.
Most amusing of all are various performs exhibiting fish on plates or other dishes — presumably about to be served for supper. “Render Unto Caesar” displays a purple fish on a multicolored platter alongside with what glance to be greens of one particular form or an additional. Two fish in darker hues strikingly stand out from a vibrant-orange-and-yellow plate in “2 Equals 5 Thousand.”
Reichert’s fish sequence is increased by realizing the individual inspiration driving it, but even the informal viewer will be capable to take pleasure in its joyously jolly evocation of aquatic existence.
“If it just triggers a little something in your individual creativeness,” she mentioned, “I’ve carried out my job.”
At a glance
“Kelly Reichert: Influences” will be on see at the Highline Espresso Artwork Space’s North Window Gallery, 693 Significant St, Worthington, by means of Feb. 28. Go to highlinecoffeeco.com.