Brunch Abroad! (at Wasnick's)

The Tinman Gallery on Garland Avenue is currently showing the work of Whitworth art professor and avid painter Gordon Wilson, titled “Brunch at Wasnick’s”.  The exhibit, sharing the welcoming space with bookshelves and jewelry displays, features works executed during or inspired by his annual trips to France, Italy, and Germany.  The paintings, whose subject matter includes Italian townscapes, farm animals, and peculiarly enchanting forests, among other things, are often done en plein air (although the restless nature of the farm animals required Wilson to paint them from a reference picture over the landscape).

The farm animals that are scattered throughout many of Wilson’s paintings are those that became regular lunchtime companions of his during his stay with his friends, Ute and Klaus Wasnick, in Adelberg, Germany.  Wilson regularly bought goat cheese, goat milk, and eggs from Wasnick’s neighbor, Tula, and in doing so he noticed that the goats and chickens became an integral part of the landscape of the area, which he was already fascinated with.  So after snapping a few photos, the neighbor’s animals took center stage in his paintings with the surrounding yard and scenery as a backdrop.

Annunciation Church 3 (center)

Other paintings focused chiefly on the town of Cupra, Italy.  Not only do the buildings create a warm, beautiful subject matter for the paintings, but the experience of painting in Cupra was one-of-a-kind, according to Wilson.  Anytime he would set up his easel in town, the locals would unfailingly wander over to greet him, and these new friends often offered refreshments; “a little vino or a lot of vino?” he recalled, laughing.  The largest of this group of paintings, Annunciation Church 3, contains foreground trees with branches that are somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh’s brush strokes, providing a cool, fluid dynamism among the warm town buildings and background landscape.  This also reappears in a few of the other townscapes, though not all of them.

While the paintings that Wilson executed in Germany and Italy comprise the majority of the artworks in the show, a few others provide a sort of energetic balance to the show as a whole.  Some depict forests of beautiful, twisting, leaf-less trees in Washington state.  The branches create an intertwining pattern, fading into the distance, that is set apart from the shrubbery and bare ground in the lower foreground.  This combination creates an inviting feeling, which, in a way I cannot quite put my finger on, is gentle and enchanting.  Two paintings also feature native Adelberg ravens, whose frequent hoarse calls earned them a spot as the paintings’ sole subject.

4 for Brunch at Wasnicks (center)

One of my personal favorite artworks in the show is 4 for Brunch at Wasnick's, a large (36 x 54”) oil painting featuring three goats and a chicken at the table for brunch.  The goats, upright with their hooves on the table, stare comically in the viewer’s direction.  Their equal spacing in the frame allows the viewer’s eye to wander back and forth among all three of them, though the tilted head of the far-right goat tends to draw some extra attention.  This, however, is offset by the chicken standing on the table just left of the center goat; its red comb provides a further balancing emphasis.  These four figures and the table--collectively, the foreground--are painted heavily with white, separating it nicely from the yellow-green background: a field with a couple goats, grazing, as well as a structure and some trees in the distance, all of which is beyond a chain link fence.  The edge of the table and the top of the fence create two horizontal divisions that split the image roughly into thirds, adding to the structure of the painting and neatly emphasizing the figures in the foreground, especially the goats that overlay roughly equal vertical thirds.

“Brunch at Wasnick’s” will be open until November 25, 2012.  I highly recommend a visit to the gallery, as viewers find themselves visiting not only in a building in Spokane, but also, vicariously through Gordon Wilson’s masterful paintings, locations in Germany, Italy, and Washington state.  It is a relaxing visual vacation to some of the world’s most beautiful places.  Treat yourself!