CWOS, Weekend 1, Sunday, two visits

Artspace
City-Wide Open Studios
50 Orange St, New Haven, (203) 772-2709
City-Wide Open Studios 2012
Through Oct. 21, 2012.
Weekend 1 Report: Sunday

Allan Greenier: "Bicycle"

Day job work commitments last Sunday limited the amount of visits I was able to make. I stop in to one of the ArLow residences in Westville, visiting first with Allan Greenier. Greenier has a room in which to show examples of both his block prints—similar to woodcuts but using a far less expensive material manufactured for countertops—and manipulated photographs.

Greenier's prints have a strong graphic quality and also something of a subversive imagination. In the 1970's and 1980's, Greenier was active in the underground mini commix scene. (Examples of his work can be found in the anthology Newave! The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980's.)

I am struck by Greenier's photographs. Manipulated in Adobe Photoshop, the images have a pulsating, psychedelic intensity.

•••

Ann Oberkirch, who is 68, has only been painting for two years. It is her first CWOS and she isn't wholly comfortable with the experience of having some visitors walk into the room where she is showing her paintings (oil painting and watercolors, often augmented with pieces of glittery fabric or other objects), glance around, and walk out.

Oberkirch's work is characterized by the naïve approach to perspective common among folk artists. She tells me, "I would be an outsider artist except I'm a doctor, so I'm too much of an insider." (Oberkirch is a psychiatrist.)

Ann Oberkirch: Untitled"

Oberkirch says she works spontaneously. One work started with a painting of a lion—referring to a photograph—and orangutans. She then added naked humans and clothed humans. The composition was filled up with images of birds, flowers and leaves. But it's not really Edenic. Oberkirch draped a pair of small chains over the painted image of the lion, suggesting the powerful creature is in a zoo, a prison.

"The people were the villains but you can't really tell. They don't look like villains," she says.

"The whole thing is a giggle. I do such morose work all day," says Oberkirch. "To start painting at age 66 without ever having doodled—where does this come from?."