Thomas Van Stein – Ted Mills

Suzanne Dvanski, left, and Joe Cicero look over art on exhibit at the 2012 One Night Stand event Paull E. Rubin at the 2012 One Night Stand event Matt Wier photos — Suzanne Dvanski, left, and Joe Cicero look over art on exhibit at the 2012 One Night Stand event
Paull E. Rubin at the 2012 One Night Stand event
Matt Wier photos

Art From Scrap continues to host the largest art-guessing game in town this Saturday with its Third Annual One Night Stand event. For those who missed the last two years, here’s the gist. Roughly 200 artists send in work on a 9×9 inch canvas, all of which are hung that morning at the Brooks Institute’s Gallery 27. All works are priced at $200 and those who buy a piece find out the identity of the artist only after they purchase.

It’s an idea borrowed directly from the Incognito event down at the Santa Monica Museum of Art — a very good idea indeed. According to Jill Cloutier at Art From Scrap, the event raised $40,000 last year (and a similar rate the year before), so it’s proven itself. Plus, as the art is purchased, it comes off the wall. With a total of 400 visitors, collectors come early and so by the end of the evening, there’s (thankfully) not much left to see.

"Amtrak Bath" 'THomas Van Stein Brad Nack — “Amtrak Bath” ‘THomas Van Stein
Brad Nack

Several months ago, Brad Nack brought four abstract artists to MichaelKate Interiors, each dealing in their own way with topography. After that, another quartet dealt with flight and birds. But this month’s exhibition, “Bright Lines and the Void” (through June 30), complicates matters further with a disparate selection of paintings from four vastly different artists. Thomas Van Stein’s nocturnal landscapes; John Carlander’s bold abstracts; Hilary Baker’s enigmatic yet representational work; and Norman Lundin’s witty realism — this is a conversation between four distinct personalities, and like a great dinner party, it’s worth sitting in and checking out what comes up.

Mr. Lundin comes from the grey climes of Seattle and you can see it in his paintings, as if somebody had told Edward Hopper to tone down the color and get the people out of the room. These are interiors and exteriors (sometimes both, seen through windows) honoring still moments on endless overcast and wet days. I say witty, because check out “Sun Break, Studio” which only shows its sun through a thin strip of light that defines the shadows on the window sill. The rest, from our perspective, is yet another gloomy, almost smoky day, looking out across the landscape in search of a horizon. These are the funereal rooms of Tarkovsky and Bergman, where time has slowed down, crawled, and given up. On the other hand, the entropy is so finely rendered that the paintings energize in a perverse way.

Tag: Thomas Van Stein

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