The Maude Kerns Art Center presents Bathers & Boats, opening with a public reception on Friday, July 21, from 6 – 8 pm. This quintessential summer show features the work of Stan Bryan, Melissa Sikes, and Roger Weise. “Bathers & Boats” is on display through Friday, August 25.
Stan Bryan, who served on the faculty of the University of Oregon School of Architecture from 1955 – 1986, is having his work exhibited posthumously. During his career Bryan worked in a variety of media, including watercolor, oil, wood, and recycled materials. The body of work shown in “Bathers & Boats” is made of unused balsa wood taken from model ships that Bryan built. By incorporating everyday objects in his balsa wood designs he reveals the whimsy of ordinary objects placed in unconventional settings.
Eugene artist Melissa Sikes captures the essence of summer in her expressive paintings of family and friends swimming in a lake and lounging on the lakeside dock of her family’s summer cabin. Sikes has an uncanny way of depicting the heat of sunshine on flesh and the coolness of the dark lake water inviting swimmers to take a plunge. She says: “It is a visceral experience, catapulting the viewer lakeside on a summer afternoon.” In her acrylic paintings on wood panel, Sikes skillfully combines two of her passions – painting the human figure and painting landscapes.
Roger Wiese, also from Eugene, focuses on boats, bathers, and the green and blue of the water that contains them and that they move through. Many of the pieces exhibited in “Bathers & Boats” began with sketches, either completed at the ocean or at a Willamette Valley lake or river. Weise describes his work in this way: “The land and waterscapes in which my bathers and boats swim and frolic are real – simplified in some cases down to their essence and adjusted to make the composition work but containing that germ of inspiration that nature alone provides.”
