Review

11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
2012 Baltimore
Kansas City, MO
816.474.1919

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Wednesday-Saturday
Runs through: May 28

Gallery site: http://www.leedy-voulkos.com

First Fridays are great for sipping, socializing and skimming. But for truly experiencing art – fully opening yourself up to the work and allowing it to to do the same for you – the monthly art walk’s insistent pace and pressing crowds can be more hindrance than help.

That’s especially true of Shirley Luke Schnell’s two shows at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, the solo Subaqueous Notations and the shared (with Jim Leedy) Upon Arriving. It's not enough to skip your eyes  across the surfaces of Schnell's paintings. They demand full attention, complete immersion.

To put it in aquatic terms:

There's a time and place for swimming parties and jammed beaches. But say you want to catch your reflection in the surface of a pool, peer into the depths of a pond to see what’s glinting at the bottom, or snorkel along a reef as small finned jewels school and scatter. Would you choose to try that alone, in relative stillness, or with a few thousand of your closest friends splashing around?

Excellent choice.

Start at the front of the main room, in the joint retrospective show. It's 1970, in the frozen time of art. Schnell's work is bold and figurative, her earliest piece loaded with purple. Moving toward the back of the gallery, viewers can mark the evolution of her style -- both in how she painted and what she chose as a surface for her works.

Reaching the room's rear wall is like coming to a shoreline. The palette shifts toward sea green, and Schnell's choice of media (acrylic on polystyrene) adds another dimension to her paintings. These small-scale works don't project into the room; they seem to deepen into the walls themselves. 

There's a sense of something both recalled and imagined, as deeply ingrained as a race memory -- and at the same time, fresh as an insight. These are the first of Schnell's "lumascapes", which she defines as paintings that originate out of a memory in the residual impact of an experience. Memory functions here as an act of recollection requiring both effort and responsibility.

Effort to maintain memories is understandable, especially as one ages. But responsibility?

That's a part of recollection as well.  Whenever we remember something, we don't recall the event itself. We remember the last memory we had of the event ... and those memories are altered by the twin filters of time and choice. To maintain an honest account, one must actively choose not to paint over the emotions associated with any event.

Keeping all that in mind, it's time to plunge all the way into Schnell's work. Move on to the back room, where the new works in Subaqueous Notations hang.

These, too, are green-intensive, acrylic on polystyrene. But there's something in these works that doesn't appear in the others: a recurring oval motif, like a reflecting pool. Many of the paintings in Subaqeous Notations are ovals. In others, the oval is a dominant image.

Schnell explains:

Underlying the lateral elliptical image ... is the idea of continuum: a stream, a canal, a river, a flume, she writes.

These, then, are not passive, still pools; these are all moving waterways. And the more you look, the deeper you dive, the longer you choose to let yourself be pulled along by the currents and whirled about by the eddies, the more likely you are to not come up for a long time.

Jump in.  The water's more than fine.

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