Professional painter Ted Easler stands next to "Chicago," done in the style of abstract expressionism. (Lauren Odomirok/Mooresville Weekly photo)
MOORESVILLE – Walking in the door of Andre Christine Gallery, a five-piece clay sculpture of acrobats suspended from the ceiling by gauzy, silver cloth greets visitors.
Inspired by Pink’s performance at the 52nd annual Grammy awards, the piece indicates the start of the “Life is a Circus” exhibit, which features everything from bright, abstract cityscapes to jewelry, glasswork and paintings of elephants atop bicycles.
Owner Lynne Gingras likes to change the gallery’s displays six times a year.
“We needed something fun,” she said. “People gravitate to animals and hot, spicy color, anything that means summer, when the circus and carnivals come to town.”
“Admit One” marks Sandy Thibeault’s first appearance in the gallery. The Sherrill’s Ford resident is a retired art teacher from Dover, Mass., who learned about egg tempera painting while taking a Renaissance art class at Massachusetts College of Art and Design 20 years ago.
Dating back to Ancient Egypt, the egg tempera technique consists of making paint from dried pigment formed from crushed, purified stone and mixing it with water and egg yolk.
The style hit its peak with Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” in 1486 but was subsequently overshadowed by oil painting.
Thibeault’s work depicts a field near the old Terrell Country Store where a few scattered carnival tents and a ferris wheel can just be made out in the distance.
“My undergraduate work was as an illustrator, so I enjoy dissecting reality and then trying to put it back together again,” Thibeault said.
Just across the gallery, Ted Easler’s bold abstracts beckon.
A professional painter, Easler moved to Mooresville in 2008 and enjoys depicting the rush of New York City life with defined geometric shapes representing its harbor, skyscrapers, cabs and fire escapes.
“I feel an artist has to have his own design, his own personality, and you don’t want to copy other artists,” he said.
Easler plays off constructivism, a movement begun with Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Borrowing from cubism and futurism, constructivist artists didn’t paint objects to be beautiful things symbolizing the larger world. They painted functional entities whose material composition could be analyzed to benefit mass production and a communist society.
Constructivism also expressed the dynamic and disorienting aspects of modern life and the work involved in finding solutions to modern problems.
In Easler’s paintings, sometimes things like boats in the blue harbor or a person peering over a wall become apparent only when he points them out.
His large oil painting, “Chicago,” is an abstract expressionist work, representing a style that blossomed in New York after World War II. Amidst the McCarthy communist trials, artistic censorship reigned, and abstract paintings were seen as apolitical – and therefore safe.
“It’s a little crazy, a jungle people live in,” Easler said of his cityscapes. “But I want the life I depict to be vibrant, colorful and alive as opposed to using somber, muted colors.”
Full article from Mooresville Weekly here.
Want some culture?
Visit the exhibit Tuesdays-Saturdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at 148 Ervin Road through September.
