Literature on DallasArts

My friend Tim said the view up at Sherry's shapes reminded him of West Texas, looking up at Longhorns coming down a hill — an oddly juxtaposed notion, but he was right.

I didn't care for the show-and-tell visual-aid, photo display of liturgical art by my former Art History teacher Lyle Novinski. But his ecstatic barn raising (below) was a lyrical, even spiritual, point and counterpoint to all those earth tones.

Lyle told me it was a riff on the big, loose, barn piece featured in his retrospective last winter. He'd finished this new painting just "five days ago, Monday — last Monday." The paint was still wet.

Lyle Novinsky

Lyle Novinski - Barn Frame, 2004 - oil on canvas

Another cruciform work (It is a Catholic university.) that drew me closer and closer in was this exquisitely drawn collection of seven spiritual, flower-like drawings by Nancy Rebal, who may have had something newer in the show, but I didn't notice.

Nancy Rebal - Efflorescence (the seven gifts), 1995
graphite on wood, central detail below

Nancy Rebal - central lotus-like drawing

From the almost sacred to the nearly profane — from the esoteria of lines on paper to the cold, hard light of day on a richly oil painted and bowed Pan, Ms Rebal set her range with this grotesque, yet humanely rendered Pan, Greek god of woods, fields and flocks.

I looked that word, grotesque, up to be sure I was using it correctly — "A style of painting, sculpture, and ornamentation in which natural forms and monstrous figures are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combinations." Yep.

Nancy Rebal - Panhandled, 1998 - oil on canvas

As startling as this grotesquerie is, the chief topic of concern at the opening was what was that object in the grass to his left. One student was pretty sure it was a shield. I thought it might be a space ship.

I've seen them at UD — over Turkey Knob (could be that lump on the left) above the nunnery (now a school) after a night of drinking and street dancing. I didn't see Pan out there, but the landscape is familiar, and I wouldn't be surprised if he were lurking somewhere close.

Nancy Rebal painting

Nancy Rebal - Exhalation, 1994 - oil on canvas

Further extending Rebal's range is this, one of three vertically paired diptychs along the entry wall. I liked it for its dark contrast, reflected heart-fires and abstract extensions, even if it is from late in the last century — a lifetime ago.

I always feel bad about the art I wasn't moved enough by to photograph then. Now I remember some great, ungainly, marvelously textured pots; lurid, densely red, paper paintings by Juergen Strunk; and carved wood shapes by the wife of my ancient Creative Writing teacher, Eugene Curtsinger, who remembered me as skinnier with darker hair.

I'm left wondering just how recent work in faculty shows ought to be, when new hires show greatest hits from the last century, and the UD teacher who turned me on to art 40 years ago exhibits work so fresh the paint's still wet.