One pulls a dress back on under a thought bubble that reads 'Oh, Lord, I hope that's got rid of him for the night.' Their unifying sensibility is their color: like American pop painter John Wesley, but darker, garish, swollenly fruity, comic-bookish. One submerged in a bathtub so only her curvy legs stick meatily out. (Williamstown, Massachusetts) In its latest exhibition, the Clark Art Institute presents an opportunity to explore the surprising but steady opposition to the use of color in printmaking in nineteenth-century France. McPhersons characters - gritty, authentic, and pristinely rendered - give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that. Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate over Colors opens on December 11, 2021. Most involve naked women: one with American flag underwear stretched down around big thighs. Hue and Cry is the remarkably mature and agile debut story collection from James Alan McPherson, one of Americas most venerated and most original writers. The paintings date back to 1969 and up to 2011. This month is his first solo show in three decades, at the Virginia Inn. Because Garner has spent most of his life promoting the art of other people-he has mounted shows by at least a thousand artists in this city since the 1970s-most people have never seen his actual art. In Seattle, color almost always seems to take the form of excess, of breaking out. Color is a form of local rebellion (I always chuckle at the name of Pike Place Market gallery Local Color). On her blog in 2010, color-happy Seattle painter Susanna Bluhm wrote, 'Throughout art, history, and literature, color is associated with base desires, sex, the feminine, intellectual decay, loss of control, fall from grace.' Bring it on, and drunkenly, says Garner. Is that why every paint job is a pale imitation of earth, trees, sky, and water?Īrtists have color wisdom. Is it to do with respecting nature? Not the human nature that lived here originally, but, you know, Nature. In Seattle, you'd starve if you needed to eat color. In climatically comparable Ireland, saturated colors live and breathe as freely as any other citizens of the spectrum, not only in villages but along Dublin streets. There is no known reason for this phenomenon. Color that's actually the opposite of color, says a writer I know. The colors that pass for colors in Seattle's built environment are beyond muted. Garner is talking about that old Seattle aesthetic: foggy gray, woolly blue, fuzzy green, shady brown.

Why? 'Just being anti-Northwest for years and years and years,' Garner says. He uses colors that polite Northwestern culture would consider either gauche or the tools of a madman.

'Just loll in color,' he says, and then the veteran Seattle artist rests. 'There's enough green here! There's enough blue! Paint your house purple!' Rolon Bert Garner charges, expending valuable oxygen in the few minutes he gets between inhaler treatments for his chronic pulmonary disease.

Hue and cry art