Current Season

Paul Hartley: Paintings and Drawings

Francis Speight: Paintings

Decorative Arts from the collection of Edna Earle Boykin

Horace Farlowe: Painting and Sculpture

19th Annual Scholastics Art Awards Exhibition

Ed Brown Retrospective

Barton Senior Art Exhibition 1997

Paul Hartley: Paintings and Drawings

August 27-September 27, 1996

Paul Hartley is Professor of Art at East Carolina University and coordinator of painting and drawing.

Francis Speight: Paintings

October 6-29, 1996
Opening Reception October 6, 2-4 p.m.

Decorative Arts from the collection of Edna Earle Boykin

October 6-29, 1996
Opening Reception October 6, 2-4 p.m.

Works in this exhibiti are on load from the collection of Edna Earle Boykin and include 17th, a8th, 19th and 20th century art and decorative arts.

Horace Farlowe: Painting and Sculpture

November 3-December 5, 1996
Artist Lecture December 5, 7:30 p.m.

19th Annual Scholastic Art Awards Exhibition

January 26-February 13, 1997
Opening Reception January 26, 2 p.m.

Since 1979, Barton College has hosted the Awards for the largest regional district in the state, currently with 62 counties from Winston-Salem to the Coast. The College is fortunate to be associated with The Wilson Daily Times, which provides financial support for the Scholastic Art Awards program.

The Awards provide the opportunity for teenagers to have their work exhibited in prestigious galleries. Barton College, as a regional affiliate hosts the work of eastern North Carolina award winners, each January. The works of 300 artists who earn Gold Medals and American Visions Medals are included in the national exhibition to be held in New York City.

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards is the nation’s most prestigious recognition program for artists and writers, which identified the early promise of Richard Avedon, Joyce Maynard, Tom Otterness, Philip Pearlstein, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, Andy Warhol, and Zac Posen.

More than $3.25 million in scholarships are available to graduating seniors who earn national medals through the Alliance Scholarship Provider Network. Twelve Portfolio Gold Medalists earn $10,000 scholarships from the Alliance. Select regions also offer cash awards, grants and other incentives. The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, a consortium of leading art and design colleges in the U.S., recognizes The Scholastic Art Awards as an effective way for students interested in art and design to develop successful portfolios for college admission.

Edward Brown Retrospective

February 22-March 21, 1997
Opening Reception February 22, 2-4 p.m.

The art produced by Ed Brown chronicles the evolution of art in the last half of the 20th century. In the early years, the forms were monumental but figurative, evoking fluid rhythm. In the middle years, the forms were monumental, nearly non-objective, evoking primitive icons. In the late work since 1990, the great visual weight and size has been replaced by the use of transient, fragile fused glass which is coloristically composed with abstract and non-objective repetition and rhythm. Now in the most recent series, the glass is presented in challenging compositions where the weight has been annotated by a small field representing plowed furrows, raked Zen gravel or lunar landscapes.

Ed Brown was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, New York, in 1957. He came to the faculty of Barton College in 1959. Ed Brown’s 36 years on the art faculty at Barton College span his entire professional career as an educator while his professional career as an artist continues.

In the figurative tradition, leading European artists like Aristide Maillol and American artists like William Zorach championed concepts of late Classical beauty expressed through monumental forms. Ed Brown’s earliest works show less emulation of the style of others than an expression and synthesis of personal interpretation. His work expresses the figurative vocabulary in wide use in America at mid-century as in Gleaner, 1957. Although Brown, like many American artist, began to explore the vocabulary of abstraction beginning in the 1950’s as in Miss Green, 1956, he did not shift his focus entirely away from the monumental figurative tradition until after the mid-1960’s.

The impact of scale, combined playfully with a dramatic use of space and subject matter, can be seen in The Blue Balloon, 1961. This engaging piece imparts to the viewer a sense of scale far beyond its material 18 inches. As early as 1963, the work of Ed Brown began to show a shift in the monumental use of the figure to the monumental spiritual impact of primitive icons and totems. Primeval, 1963, in size and resonance expresses a “global” symbol devoid of European bias or cultural specificity. The introduction of brazed copper and steel as media appears later in many of Brown’s works of the 1960’s and the 1970’s.

Among Ed Brown’s most powerful works is Man with Tattoos, 1964. This plaster carving was produced for a yet uncast bronze. The powerful presence of form and mass contrasts with the linear delicacy of the intaglio decorations on the massive arms and expose simultaneously the universal themes of dignity and power of the human spirit and the frailty and vanity of the human experience. We see this figure as both immovable and vulnerable. The slightly turned head of the man allows the viewer to participate in the momentary searching of thought.

In the 1960’s, Brown explored the use of found objects restated as weights on the spatial balance. Whether the piece is fully manufactured by the artist as in Ball and Chain, 1964, or composed of readily identifiable parts as in Carolina Farm Song, 1965, the pieces appear as abstract whirly-gigs poised and ready for movement. They, also, restate his icon principle, in an unfamiliar way as if to be unstructured totems. In the exhibition, produced during this period, are two clearly defined totems Sculpture Flower, 1966, Nesting Place, 1969.

Another image emerged in the 1960’s, as the organic grouping of roughly spherical forms in Nearing the Galaxy, 1964. The viewer’s sense of forms replicating themselves suggests regeneration, another universal theme. This theme is often repeated in the 1970’s in both sculpture and ceramic vessels: Another Grotto, 1975; Bottle Form, 1976; and Bottle Birthing, 1978.

A major piece and image of resolution in 1972 is Guardian of the World. This clear presentation of the sphere as a globe composed of found and manufactured objects presents the primitive icon through use of discarded historical context. The cross fertilization of images and techniques here is fully resolved simultaneously with monumental impact and linear delicacy. Linear delicacy and implied motion are expressed in Dancing Red, 1972. A taut coil is prepared to spring, powered by the color red.

Another piece of the 1970’s to resolve earlier directions is Figure, 1975, in welded steel. Without the use of monumental forms, the over-scale height of the piece lessens our perceived scale of ourselves. The sphere/globe image is repeated in the torso and the decorative delicacy is repeated in the articulated surface and expressive hands. The starburst on the torso creates a cosmic super nova tattoo on the global field. Several pieces, both carved and fabricated, in the 1970’s explore abstract forms or shapes. Most of the pieces of the 1970’s express Brown’s honest use of materials to represent themselves in addition to further developing the themes. The rich tones of brass and earth dominate. Occasionally, surprisingly interrupted by primary color impact.

The totem image, sometimes varied as a wall-hung piece, in the 1970’s is represented in the exhibition by Lonely Chain, 1970; Lonely Blue, 1971; Cage, 1973; Spheres Climbing, 1973; Tower, 1973; Fancy White, 1976; and Captured Spheres, 1979. The exploration of new materials as in Captured Spheres (fiberglass) indicates a desire to find new vehicles for materializations of previous themes. In the 1980’s, Brown explored new materials used in new ways including the unexpected combinations of ceramic, leather, cord, fabric, brass, or copper tubing. He articulated spheres in new ways. The spheres are sometimes split and elongated as in Embellished Pot, 1981. The spheres are sometimes flattened as in Little Islands, 1982. Suspended and spaced as planets, the spheres in Remembering the East, 1983, create a new order of horizontal totem.

The surprising introduction of ribbons of color in Captured, 1981, foreshadows the importance of color in the glass works of the 1990’s. This beginning of a period of exploration in the 1980’s, a most imaginative and creative period, culminates with the introduction of fused glass as the principle medium of the 1990’s. The weight and monumental forms of the earlier work is in distinct contrast to the fragile delicacy of the glass color compositions – a shift from the material to the ephemeral.

The fused glass compositions are presented as pieces of art that have a “front” as they are wall-mounted rather than “in the round” as are most earlier 3-dimensional pieces. The pieces are now of glass but bas-relief with articulated surfaces as were several of Brown’s earliest pieces. The universal themes continue to be expressed as small spheres of suns or moons suspended with “ribbons of color: to suggest the foreground land forms. The emphasis has shifted – now using the universe as a means to express the universal. The Arabesque Series since 1995 often suggests cosmic landscapes or energy, ephemeral as glass and the imagination. The poetic titles, often suggesting universal themes, show artist Ed Brown’s continuing search fro the resolution of monumental concept.

We are challenged by the juxtaposition of the ephemeral glass and , although small in scale, the molten fields are carefully articulated as if gravel rakes as a Zen meditation, earth built as an ancient land work, or lunar landscape documented as an Apollo expedition record. In the Arabesque Series, seen from above, glass becomes water while material becomes land sculpted by man and recorded by the artist. We are confronted by a new view – a new landscape cross-referenced in the imagination. The unexpected presentation communicates the artist’s desire to present without the finite use of framing suggesting more a Prairie house retaining wall than a box to contain an image. The only historical reference is to the artist’s own visual history as recorded in this retrospective.

Barton Senior Art Exhibition 1997

April 6-May 14, 1997
Opening Reception April 6, 2-4 p.m.