May 1 - June 3, 2021
From the gallery:
“Archway Gallery presents Exploring Paint, featuring new paintings by Shirl Riccetti and donna e perkins, on view May 1 – June 3, 2021. Virtual Opening and Artist Talks will be posted to the gallery website, Facebook, and You Tube.
When friends Shirl Riccetti & donna e perkins decided to have a show together, they could never have anticipated such a tumultuous year as 2020. Perkins, an abstract painter working in acrylics, and Riccetti, a more traditional painter working in pen and watercolor, decided to confront the challenges of 2020 by continuing to do what they have been doing for most of their lives, Exploring Paint.
Shirl Riccetti is an avid traveler. She has documented her trips to Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (just to name a few) in pen and watercolor. Her sketchbooks hold narratives from her journeys, with notes of the smells and sounds, as well as her reactions and feelings of the moment. Riccetti feels that historic buildings hold memories of their past, and that people reflect their own journeys and stories.
The memories evoked from her sketches and notes empower Riccetti’s pen to create lines that might be thick, thin, wobbly, uneven, or precise. She develops each painting differently, putting herself back into that time, and the moments that ‘grabbed’ her attention. Each drawing brings a memory into focus…. The giggling Chinese girls taking her photo in Sorrento as she was sketching, watching a family cow saunter down the mountain following a Slovak shepherd, the horrific sight of WWII bullet holes in a wall in Budapest, a family’s garden wall in Italy…. Shirl Riccetti captures moments of peoples’ lives and honors these encounters by documenting them with her pen and brush, with the drama of line and color.
In contrast, the paintings in this exhibition by donna e perkins are abstract and reflect her physical relationship with her materials. Perkins delights in the tactile dance of her body, her arm, her fingers; a solo dance of meditation. She loves the slight bounce of the canvas resisting the pressure of her brush. She loves how liquid paint drips, runs, flows, and how one color morphs into another. She loves how paint squashes making micro mountain landscapes when the squashes are pulled apart and how light flirts with the iridescent and metallic then bounces off the miniscule ridges of strokes of paint. “My work is process driven,” says perkins. “While there is always a back story, there is never a narrative.”
The studio in which an artist works has an influence on that work. Some of this influence is physical and practical, but some is emotional. Perkins’ paintings were created in three different studios and represent three different relocations, all of which were stressful both physically and emotionally. Some of her paintings are somber, some bright, some shiney. Instead of a cohesive body of work, perkins presents the turmoil of the past two years, three hard moves, and an injured body in a COVID haze. “In many ways, this has been such a stressful time for me that I struggled just to keep my hand moving,” perkins recounts. “This work is very experimental.”
About the Artists:
Shirl Riccetti, with her Fine Arts degree from the University of St. Francis, began her career as a layout artist and copywriter for a newspaper. During her long career, her art has carried her through various and diverse freelance assignments, gallery work, and part-time teaching. She has taught Contour Drawing workshops and constantly finds joy in watercolor, pen, and printmaking. Shirl is a member of the Watercolor Art Society of Houston (WAS-H), Houston Calligraphy Guild, and Women in the Visual and Literary Arts (WIVLA). Her dream project is to have some of her 18 travel sketchbooks published.
When donna e perkins was still small enough to stand in the church pew, her parents gave her paper and pencil to keep her quiet during services. In junior high she was given oil paints. She has been drawing and painting ever since. After earning a Master’s Degree from the University of Houston at Clear Lake, perkins taught art in public schools for 20 years. She joined Archway Gallery in 2008.”
On View: May 1, 2021 | 1–5 pm
2305-A Dunlavy
Houston, 77006 TX
(713) 522-2409
Get directions