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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

WHO? “STOP, GO, CAUTION,” A PRINT BY BILL COLBY, APPLIES THE “CLOSE-UP” THEME OF THE SHOW TO HIS STYLIZED OWLS.

Impromptu artists close in on Chuck Close

By Dave R. Davison

The eclectic cooperative of artists who have pooled their talents into Tacoma’s Impromptu Gallery have assembled an exhibit entitled “Close Encounters” – a self-assigned spin-off of the Chuck Close exhibit that is currently on display at Tacoma Art Museum (TAM).

Punning on Close’s name, the Impromptu artists have contributed their own versions of the “close-up.”

Painter Trinda Love, for example, presents large canvasses with blown-up still lifes of carrots and radishes. Print maker and former University of Puget Sound (UPS) art professor Bill Colby contributes stylized owls – so close that their big eyes dominate the image.

Betty Sapp Ragan presents two large photo collages that combine photographic portraits with architectural elements in order to personify two continents – Africa and Asia – in metaphoric fashion as was popular in the Baroque era.

Dorothy McCuistion offers a different take on the “Close Encounters” theme by creating grainy, digitized, two-tone prints of the recent birth of her grandchild.

LeeAnn Perry’s soapstone sculptures, meanwhile, grace the gallery space, perched upon their white pedestals.

The star of the show, however, is Chip Van Gilder, whose display of photographic portraits seems at once an homage and a parody of the enormous, labor intensive portraits of Chuck Close on display at TAM. Van Gilder’s particular part of the exhibit is entitled “One more way to do something.” Working by more economic means than those employed by Close, Van Gilder offers large, black and white portraits that nevertheless achieve an effect similar to that of Close.

Van Gilder’s self portrait brings into focus just the strong face and beefy arms of the photographer. All else is lost in the inky blackness of the background.

His portrait of Tacoma arts dynamo Lynn Di Nino is a masterpiece. A stern-looking Di Nino gazes intently into the camera. The focus of the lens on her face makes her hair blur into a smoky halo. She holds a cat that seems hyper-real, like the Platonic idea of “cat” itself.

Van Gilder’s portraits are accompanied by poems by Tacoma’s one-man creative brain trust Daniel Blue whose own portrait hangs alongside the others. Lank and brooding, Blue’s hands hang loose and momentarily idle.

Van Gilder’s works are iconographic, memorializing his co-members of the Impromptu Gallery as well as some of the luminaries of the Tacoma art world.

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