San Diego ArtsStephen Curry and K.V. Tomney at the Athenaeum in La Jolla
Outside Looking While strolling around your neighborhood, what intrigues you? Things in plain sight or something obscured behind a fence or beyond a tree? Two artists now exhibiting in separate solo exhibitions at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla appear to enjoy peeping behind and beyond. Kimberly Tomney draws spied views of people’s swimming pools, and Stephen Curry paints scenes as he peers through trees and shrubs. Ms. Tomney, who graduated from SDSU, makes drawings with ballpoint pen on blue-lined notebook paper in a primitive style similar to the awkward renderings created by high school students. Tomney’s exhibition entitled Keeping in Form is restricted to scenes with swimming pools void of people. She paints the pool water in each drawing with shiny aluminum powder that when dry appears like quicksilver. By drawing on blue-lined notebook paper with ballpoint pen in such a rudimentary fashion, Tomney is attempting to cultivate a naïve or outsider artist influence in her work. She uses this style to her advantage in her earlier works from 2007 such as “Olive Ct.” which depicts an above-ground-pool and part of a house sitting in an uncomfortable floating space. The school-age drawing style, the notebook paper, the unconvincing space, and the middleclass backyard pool mesh together to form a credible sign of obsessed childhood memory. In her more recent works, the drawings become more sophisticated in their design, and Tomney can no longer convince the viewer of her outsider status. Art historical influences such as Bauhaus, De Stijl, and linear perspective creep into her drawings. She also better uses the notebook paper blue-lines as specific design elements in her compositions. In “Lemon Grove Ave.” (2009), Tomney infuses more complex design with asymmetrical balance: vertical blue notebook paper lines lay on the left to balance a drawn diagonal wall and the silver pool thrusting to the right of the scene. Ironically, as her drawings become more sophisticated, Tomney’s adolescent ballpoint pen drawing style becomes less innocent and more formulaic and calculating. The subject of the pools are beginning to read as mere devices to play with composition rather than to convey deep meaning or psychological fixation, thus the intrusion of her collegiate art training seems to betray her naïve style as a potential gimmick or shtick. Stephen Curry paints the landscape by actually removing the shrubbery in his solo exhibition entitled Next to Nothing. His oil paintings that are included in this exhibit from 2007-2008 focus on the negative space fragments of a scene that one might see when looking through bushes or trees. His method of working is to first lay down a smooth single hue layer all over the canvas. He then paints the distant visual fragments that might be seen when looking through foliage with a colorful impasto with the consistency of cake frosting. The effect is both akin to looking through a bush and akin to looking like thickly painted fragments of confetti falling through the air simultaneously. Curry’s large scale painting from this period, “Constellation #21” (2008), features intense ultra-marine blue as the large smooth layer with saturated reds and yellows for the impasto fragments. Standing away from the painting, its eye-catching color and scale are luxurious; but when viewing it up-close, the surface is disappointing because both the smooth ultra-marine layer and the impasto fragments were applied in a utilitarian manner. After comparing the saturated color and brush work of “Constellation #21” for a longtime, one might leave with the impression that Mr. Curry is painting an attractive canvas more out of spite than joy. Curry’s more recent works also use the negative space and each consists of multiple small panels of birch plywood. A masking material has been applied to individual panels in either geometric or vegetation shapes, then over painted with a monochrome white or black enamel, and then the masking material was removed to reveal the plywood surface in the geometric or vegetation shapes. Again because of the utilitarian way in which the paint has been applied, one ends up focusing on the figural grain of the plywood rather than the paint. This is a lightweight conceptual joke. The panels are then mounted on the wall in a decorative arrangement and their effect is similar to viewing an assembly of decoratively stenciled swatch samples.  Stephen Curry; "Negative Construct" (2009). Image courtesy of the artist and the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library. His most spontaneous looking artwork is one of the most enjoyable to view. Curry’s small untitled drawing (from 2009) on paper cut into a foliage patterns is covered allover with random charcoal strokes. The unframed paper hangs delicately from the wall. Together, the gestural charcoal marks and the shaped paper evoke delicate, intricately woven black lace. The small artwork is very satisfying to look at due to the combination of the paper’s refined shape and the drawing’s gestures, which display passion and verve—emotional qualities that appear to be absent from Curry’s other artworks in the exhibit.
 Kraig Cavanaugh About the author: Kraig Cavanaugh is a San Diego-area college art history and studio instructor who has written for Artweek and Gallery News. He was a co-curator for Spruce Street Forum's visual art program and has curated for Sushi Performance and Visual Arts. In 2009, he was also awarded first place in the Reviews category by the San Diego Press Club. More by this author Subscribe to Arts:
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very creative design,very chic style.
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December 11, 2009
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Virginia Lukei
artist of parallel universes
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