Artists integrate natural materials
   ROY PROCTOR - Dec 08, 2002, Richmond Times Dispatch
      

FIVE LESSONS FROM NATURE
November - December 2002  at The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, Richmond VA.

Artists have been representing nature since art began.

Gwen Van Ostern, who curated "Five Lessons From Nature" at The Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen, takes pride in the fact that her five Richmond artists also use natural materials in their work.

"Dennis uses wood blocks to make his prints, and you can see the grains of the wood in his images," she says, pointing to Dennis Winston's 10 wood-block prints.

She contemplates Barbara Dill's eight totemic sculptures rising from the floor. "Barbara carves discarded wood she finds in her North Side neighborhood," she says before passing on to Susan Iverson's six tapestries with nature-based imagery.

"Susan makes her tapestries of wool and silk, which are organic materials."

She indicates the clay that, with hundreds of embedded nails, yields Jane Hendley's 11 anemone-like wall sculptures.

But she lingers longest on Anne Savedge's 15 still lifes created with "digital photography" on high-quality archival watercolor paper.

"I don't know that there's a single idea behind this show other than the artists' appreciation of natural materials and nature," Van Ostern says. "They're all beautiful in their own way, and these artists are able to use natural imperfections to their advantage.

"Anne, for example, uses snakes, insects, animal skeletons, leaves, decaying wood - anything that normally would be thrown in the trash - and makes something beautiful out of them."

Visitors are also likely to linger longest over Savedge's still-life arrangements, which seem to glow with inner light, while wondering whether they're really photographs at all.

"They're photographs in that they capture the image in a photographic manner, but they aren't photographs in the sense that there's film or a conventional camera," says Savedge, who has been in the vanguard of digital imagery here and nationally for a decade.

Savedge arranges her dead snakes, leaves and other objects she finds in nature on the glass bed of a flatbed scanner. The scanner light passing over the material produces the image.

"I'm using the scanner like a camera," says Savedge, who relies on the Adobe PhotoShop program to achieve her effects. "It has a lens, which is light-sensitive and records.

"Think of it like a photocopier, but with differences. With a photocopier, only what touches the glass is in focus. The scanner, unlike the photocopier, gives me depth of field. It took me a long time to think upside down."