“Don’t be shy” seems to have been The Carnegie’s message to the five artists whose individual exhibitions make up The Bold, Beautiful and Bizarre, the season opener at the Covington arts center. The artists’ responses are each their own — two ceramicists could never be mistaken for one another, two painters are in different realms and the sculptor is engrossed in his own fantastical world.
Robin G. Stinetorf’s knock-your-eyes-out work requires space and gets it in the Carnegie’s capacious first-floor gallery. Meanwhile, in one of the four upstairs galleries, Kelly Jo Asbury’s paintings haven’t a hard edge in them. Her colors are muted but strong, her shapes meld into one another. Ceramicist Greg Penner asks us to rethink cute. In her ceramics, Brenda Tarbell can go back to an idea again and again, always finding something new. Sculptor Mark Frommeyer draws in the air with slim metal wire, most often producing airplanes that in their faintly ungainly shapes suggest the unlikeliness of flight.
But there is a common thread among these diverse artists, which is technical skill put to imaginative ends. They are good at what they do, and they do it with élan. See review here.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2008.