ART REVIEW: Oklahoma City exhibits convey cinematic sense of Old West
June 11, 2015 - John Brandenburg
A romantic yet coolly removed, almost cinematic sense of the Old West is conveyed by shows at JRB Art at The Elms.
A free Prix de West brunch will be offered from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Sunday at JRB, along with art by Joe Andoe, Billy Schenck and Bert Seabourn.
A pale horse, standing very still, feet together, while looking over one shoulder at us, traverses the 142-by-72-inch horizontal expanse of Andoe’s giant oil. Displayed in a one-room gallery and emerging from the dark like a phantom, Andoe’s off-white horse, with tiny specs, has a strong visual impact.
Internationally known, Andoe is a Tulsa-area native and graduate of the University of Oklahoma who has lived in New York City since 1985. He is part Cherokee.
Santa Fe, N.M., artist Schenck’s rich-hued, well resolved oils also have mythic resonance, powerful yet elusive, as if based on computer-altered images or old movie stills.
A robed, blanketed woman stands on a sandy rise, in front of a massive cloud and shadowy, receding figures, balancing jugs on heads, in Schenck’s “Morning Gathering.”
Wonderfully still and solitary is the rider facing us on “Raton Ridge,” with red, sunlit mesas behind him, in another oil by Schenck, a ranch proprietor as well as artist.
A female rider and a child tend sheep, “Grazing Their Way Home,” and a tall lady in Western attire stands “Above Lake Woebegone,” as birds fly over, in two more Schenck oils.
Blending Southwest landscape elements with almost cheesy movie magic is Schenck’s oil of a standing, partly nude female, in his “Study for Phaedra and Her Wolves.”
Expressionist Oklahoma City artist Seabourn juggles American Indian, cattle country and contemporary satiric subjects artfully in his bold, bright acrylics at JRB.
Gray feathers and greenish features give a ghostly aura to his “unfinished” acrylic of “Wolfe Robe,” while a gray-skinned, red-lipped “Fifty Shades” woman is handled more satirically.
A back view of a black Brahman-type bull, swishing its tail, offers a bow to the stockyards, and Seabourn’s grim-visaged profile of “Sitting Bull” has a powerful, deadpan quality.
The exhibits of Schenck and Seabourn, and Andoe’s one-painting show, are highly recommended during their run through June 27 at JRB.
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