Need to counter the gloom of early December in Vermont, but can’t get yourself to the warm azure waters of the Mediterranean? Johnson is a viable alternative. That’s where Arista Alanis is presenting “Windfall: Paintings & Monoprints,” through December 11 at Vermont Studio Center‘s Red Mill Gallery.
The show combines two main bodies of work: calming little monoprints based on Alanis’ travels to Greece, Costa Rica and the coast of Maine; and abstract paintings bursting with color and energy.
Alanis has worked as a staff artist at Vermont Studio Center going on 30 years. For most of that time, she has run the center’s partnership with local elementary schools, teaching art to generations of Lamoille County kids. Somehow, she seems to have bottled their joyful chaos and deployed it in her paintings.
“Traveling hands of time,” the largest work in the show at 6 by 5 feet, is a Day-Glo tornado of a composition. A mass of stylized green leaves flows from its center, jockeying for the foreground with blurrier echoes of the same shapes in orange and magenta. Pink and violet are interrupted by apple green, sometimes dripping as though flung at the canvas. Around all this, wide magenta and Indian yellow stripes give the painting structure; patches of variegated deep blues become oceans with tiny bathers floating here and there.
Two paintings from the same series, the 30-by-24-inch “On and on” and 3-foot-square “Wilderness poem,” are smaller but no less feisty. In “On and on,” Alanis’ patterns — pointed ovals and teardrops that read as leaves or fish — sit back, leading the eye toward a horizontally striped sun setting over a striped ocean. Their meditative calm is interrupted by a geyser of paint flung through the middle of the canvas, vertical but flurried, like a clump of seagrass in a strong wind.
“Wilderness poem” is airier, integrating gestural paint with pattern and even offering two versions of yellow leaves: some sharp and regular, standing out against greens and violet; and some brushy, diminishing into a jumbled jungle by the ocean.
That painting looks like a very different version of the scene in “Playa Carrillo” 2, 3 and 4, three black-and-white monoprints. Each presents a view of a distant island, seen through a close thicket of vegetation; from left to right, the plants shift from naturalism toward pattern.
Below them on the wall, five 5-by-4-inch monoprints from the “Ocean Sketch” series trade pattern for color. In each, Alanis has created a base of variegated deep blues and gently wiped the plate to create peaks and reflections on waves. “Ocean Sketch” 4 and 14 situate tiny, barely suggested bathers in the surf, while 2 and 3 offer only ripples on the surface.
Across the room, Alanis continues her experiments with oceans in slightly larger 8-by-6-inch monoprints of the Aegean. Here, bathers float in turquoise expanses framed by rocks or caves. With a few well-placed strokes creating highlights and carefully seen shadows, “Aegean Sea #8” conveys light reflecting off the water onto the roof of a natural tunnel. The hint of a bather in a swimsuit — inferred from the same figure in the rest of the series — offers the viewer a way to dip their toe into that distant sea.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
