Arts reporter and critic Rosemary Ponnekanti keeps you in touch with the arts and culture scene with the help of other News Tribune writers, critics and editors.
Rosemary Ponnekanti is the arts reporter at The News Tribune, and has been a classical music nerd nearly all her life. Besides spending way too much time in galleries, museums and concert halls, she occasionally brings a whistle or double bass to Celtic jam sessions, and insists on singing "Happy Birthday" in four-part harmony.
Other contributors include:
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If you haven't yet seen the excellent show of William Turner landscapes at the Tacoma Public Library's main branch, get in there quickly before it closes on Saturday. Hung in the Handforth Gallery (go left and up the stairs after the check-out desk,) this series of small-to-medium oils is definitely worth a visit.
Turner's a long-time Tacoma artist, teaching at Pratt Fine Arts Center, Tacoma Community College and Centrum in Port Townsend. His work has a strong flavor of Jacob Lawrence, with whom he studied at the University of Washington, yet hits a thoughtful point between abstract and figurative that makes you think of the geometry of Klee and Braque as much as anything. But above all, here is an artist who obviously loves paint, and isn't afraid to sink his teeth into the medium.
Up at the library is Turner's recently-painted Valley series, inspired by a stretch of the Kent valley farmland that he sees from I-5 on his commute. Turner says the series is an "meditation on our intimate relation with the land and our dependance on it," and his views of this valley are indeed intimate, their closeness riding the horizon line up and out of the picture plane and turning the landscape into a semi-abstract pattern of color fields that plays games with our perspective. Turner's hues are Lawrence-like: saturated, complex and intense, a little melancholy. Peachy purples, indigos, cornflower blues, bottle greens and a sweeping sand dance and talk like scales in a jazz piece, riffing on emotions. The figurative morphs and blurs: Trees fade into blobs, fields become mere squares.
Down the corridor past the gallery are seven smaller works. Crammed with visual thought, they're the valley in miniature, and quite lovely in this scale.
William Turner's "Valley Series" is up in the Handforth Gallery through April 11. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Free. Tacoma Public Library main branch, 1102 Tacoma Ave. S., Tacoma. 253-591-5666, www.tacomapubliclibrary.org, www.williamturnerart.com
