Paint & Clay Club Makes A Buzz

He sits in the kind of light that a nobleman might sit for in a 17th century portrait. Or it could be the light from a naked bulb over his head. The light sets his shoulder ablaze, deepens the shadows below his knees. It obscures his face a little, too, but not the tattoos on his arms. He’s defined by his occupation here, or maybe his vocation — a drummer — and you get the sense that’s how he wants it, to be valued not by what he has, but by what he does, what he brings into the world.

Alfonsina Betancourt’s The Drummer greets you as you enter the gallery in Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street, showing the New Haven Paint & Clay Club’s 117th annual juried art exhibition now until June 2. It’s easy to understand why D. Samuel Quigley — this year’s judge and the director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London — awarded it one of the exhibition’s many prizes. Beyond the painter’s sheer technical ability, there’s the embrace of the present day in the subject’s stance, his clothes, his ink, his hair. We could bump into this guy on State Street, heading into Cafe Nine for a gig. We could see him at a bus stop, or walking across the Green. This is a painting made right now, for an audience right now. It’s art for and about us.

And it’s not alone among the work of 78 painters and sculptors, set up in CAW’s airy, light-filled two-story gallery.

Dianne Dunn Smith’s canvas finds a farrier — someone who cares for horses’ hooves, including shoeing them — engaged in his work. The occupation (like that of a drummer) is as old as civilization, but from the farrier’s dress we can see this isn’t a throwback. Smith’s brushstrokes are even kinetic enough to convey some of the danger inherent in the farrier’s work. At first glance, this reporter thought the horse was kicking the man, and the man was buckling in pain, before I understood that the man was just doing his job, and doing it well enough to not exhaust the horse’s patience.

Much of the portraiture in the exhibition luxuriates in ordinary details, taking subjects and poses that seem more like photographs than paintings. Maybe they were painted from photographs; maybe they weren’t. Either way, it means something that painter Mary Lou Pellegrino wasn’t satisfied with directing a lens, capturing a moment of a man sitting with his dog on the couch. Instead, the painter chose to spend hours with pigments, brush, and canvas, rendering the folds in a T‑shirt, the fur of a dog, the veins of a foot. Whatever the guy is doing in the painting — watching TV? Having a conversation? — the work makes the moment more poignant. It asks us to look with the same care that the painter took in making the image.

Allison Riback takes freezing a second in time to an extreme not often found in painting. The woman in the painting may be absorbed in daydreams, but in Riback’s painting, it’s the rivulets of water streaming down the window, distorting the scene behind them, that absorb us.

And then there’s Frank Bruckmann lavishing the kind of attention painters in the past have paid to Paris boulevards to a rainy evening on the Merritt Parkway. One hopes Bruckmann painted this from memory rather than from a photograph; either way, the scrapes and specks of color from his brush convey the speed of the traffic and the energy of the rain hitting the driver’s windshield. The image captures the space of a breath, just before the windshield wiper swipes the droplets of water away. Other paintings in the exhibition similarly find their subjects in our everyday lives: buildings in Waterbury, boats working New Haven’s harbor.

Portraiture, in fact, only makes up about half of the paintings on display in the exhibition. In addition to the landscapes on the first floor, the walls of the second floor of the gallery are alive with vivid abstraction, whether the painters have delineated sharp geometric shapes or reveled in the contours that the brush creates. Hannah Jung’s Come to the Water, meanwhile, straddles the line between landscape and abstraction in a way that’s both calming and somehow filled with energy. A stand of trees with their roots submerged in water, marsh grass behind them, offer a kind of framing device and then blur into the background. The real subject, the thing that holds the eye, is the color blue, dark and shadowy in some parts of the canvas, crackling with electricity in other parts.

Similarly, Doug Deveny washes out and abstracts his image until it becomes the ghost of a landscape. Maybe it’s a riff on seeing something through a frost-covered window. But it more conjures up a sense of the land itself fading away — maybe into the past as the viewer, always moving into the future, struggles to remember it.

The sculptures in the show likewise range from representational to abstract. On one end of the spectrum is Adrian Pulido’s Pumpkin (Pull), realistic enough at first glance to be mistaken for the genuine article before a second look allows us to admire the skill that went into creating it — and recall that so much of what occurs in nature is artistry in itself.

Michael V. Gill’s Fugue in Metal, meanwhile, pulls off the sculptor’s trick of making their chosen material seem like another material altogether. Gill transforms his metal shapes into something much lighter, the shapes resembling those of billowing sails, as if the piece might take off for the horizon across the street.

Michael Seri’s surprising piece takes the term ​“mixed media” to a playful extreme, as it seems to encompass not just paint and glue, but a beehive (or a very convincing facsimile of one), model trains, and what look for all the world like actual bees. The piece on its face is riffing on the idea of the morning commute and the ways people shuttling to and from work can seem like insects, bringing to mind the usual comparisons to worker bees and drones, and descriptions of trains stations as buzzing with activity.

But the details of Seri’s piece suggest something much more menacing and fun. The analogy of people to insects doesn’t quite hold because there are already people in the piece, on the model train cars that Seri has entering and exiting the hive. Suddenly the mental movie changes to the idea of giant bees crawling all over moving train cars, the people inside panicking, which is both something straight out of a B‑movie from the 1950s (was it radiation that made them so big?) and also, of course, something that would be absolutely terrifying if we were experience it in real life. Why go to your office job if you risk attack by giant bees? Maybe it’s better to stay home, and just play the drums all day.

The New Haven Paint & Clay Club’s 117th annual juried art exhibition is up now until June 2 at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon Street. Click here for hours and more information.