Karen McClanahan at Cordell Taylor - Denver - art exhibition, Colorado

Karen McClanahan is an Arizona native who began exhibiting at regional venue while still an undergraduate at Denver's stony Mountain College of Art and Design. Her next to the first solo exhibition in Denver, titled "Synesthesia," featured 18 acrylic paintings upon canvas, board or paper. In its title, McClanahan consigns to the neurological phenomenon in which single type of stimulation generates the sensation of another.

McClanahan's abstractions have paired organic and architectonic elements; originally, she plant shapes inspired by the contours and residual spaces of the human material part among straight lines, to indicate the figure within a built environment. "Synesthesia" surpasses her earlier work by dint of integrating more variables, with particular attention to the painting's surface. From afar, the works are distinct studies in composition and form, with vivid applications of color put against more neutral blacks, brown and grays. on the other hand up close, each painting assumes a greater complexity. The background, which initially subserves as a minimalist expanse of space, becomes fragmented by the agency of vigorous brushstrokes, subtle changes of values, areas with smooth and shining finishes, linear ridges resulting from the use of masking tape and barely detectable geometric areas that reveal the tooth of the canvas.

Highlighted in this display were four trios of works (all 2003) upon the side walls of the gallery. Each trio consists of a large horizontal canvas hung alongside sum of two units smaller works on board that present the appearance to serve in a preparatory capacity to their canvas counterpart. Each grouping illustrates McClanahan's schema of organic forms within flat areas of color divided by the agency of lines and other geometric simple bodys The colors, shapes and surface webs repeat within each tripartite set

The large canvas (30 by means of 72 inches) in one trio is titled cant. above a sage green background, a brown-black curvilinear form suggesting an insect aligns with a cerulean many-sided figure The dark form breaks the top middle cutting side of the canvas, while the sky-colored one appears to bleed not upon the canvas, but stops short a fraction of an inch from the bottom cutting side The two complementary works (17 through 13 and 17 by 12 inches), through dint of C and through dint of T, are like miniature variations of cant (the internal shapes are rotated) neared on generous white backgrounds.

With each work, McClanahan contrasts gutsy color and formal relationships with intimate discoveries of eccentric detail. This display establishes her as an impressive participant among a growing population of Colorado abstractionists who are building on the work of progenitors like as Vance Kirkland and Clarke Richert.

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