Review

"Jerusalem's East Gate," Oil on Canvas.

Lisa Cowan

10 a.m.-7 p.m.

ARTichokes
10557 Mission Road
Leawood, KS
913.322.9481

Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday.
Runs through: May 8.

Gallery site: http://www.artichokeskc.com

Lisa Cowan came early to color and late to oil painting. Since the latter interest intersected with the former, not even five years ago, she hasn't looked back.

Here's the story, in two installments:

While making a Hawaiian lei in sixth grade out of purple and orange crepe paper, my teacher told me that I could not use those two colors together as they did not go together, writes Cowan, one of the current round of featured artists at ARTichokes in Leawood.  That sparked an interest and curiosity about color that has always stayed with me.

After a short detour to note that sunsets often come in purple and orange (and tend to be pretty gorgeous, to boot), we flash forward through years of raising four sons as a stay-at-home mom. Cowan continues:

I have brought color into our home as well as my garden.  While staying home to raise our four boys, I enjoyed creating things with them and for them, but did not have much time for art.  Once our kids were older, my father kept encouraging me to try painting.  Never having done oils, I signed up for a continuing ed class at JCCC in the fall of 2005 and fell in love with oil painting.

Cowan expresses that affection in ways both light and weighty.

Visually, her style runs to the former adjective: warm and illumined, with a softness at the edges that in no way weakens the work.

Thematically, her paintings can be as light as the joy of licking the beater or as weighty as iron or a bull bison, weightless as a sunbeam or heavy as stone and history.

Those last three elements merge in Jerusalem's East Gate, today's featured work. Beyond the physical bulk of the walls themselves, there is the weight of thousands of years of despair and triumph, celebration and destruction, struggle and sacrifice and hope.

But here, too, Cowan offers light: the glow of sun on the eastern wall, signaling the morning of another day of possibilities ... not only for those in the city, but for each of us.

After all, this could be the day another sixth grader turns an admonition into a fascination, or another new painter falls in love with oil ... and doesn't look back.