Interesting Mix In Alliance Show

While LTV's studios may be a great place for a costume ball, they really aren't the greatest venue for a group art show.

The Jimmy Ernst Artists Alliance is holding its annual members' exhibit in this vast black hole of a building, where the lighting simply wasn't planned for the purpose, and many of the smaller, more delicate works are swallowed up. The one painting that thrives is Nova Noah's gigantic psychedelic space odyssey, its black background blending into the black walls and its Day-Glo rocket ships and planets leaping from the darkness like a trailer for the new "Star Trek" movie.

It is a practically impossible task even under the best of circumstances to hang a show of this size and variety, and the organizers have done their best, but next time a venue with natural light and white walls might be a better choice, even if everyone had to be restricted to one small entry. It's a mixed show: mixed in media, size, style, and also in level of ability.

Personal Favorites

Which perhaps makes it all the more interesting. You have every element of the local artistic community represented here, from good to not-so-good, from unassuming to pretentious, from visionary to derivative. It's really fun to walk round and round this echoing cavern and pick out your favorites.

Here are some of mine - a personal choice that, given the huge selection, shouldn't be read as anything more than that.

Amongst the landscape paintings, the genre with the most entries, many concentrated on the East End's wet, watery edges. Lou Diamond's straightforward watercolors, Norman Seaver's wetlands and upturned boats (hung almost too high to see), and Christine Chew Smith's impressionistic dunescape capture their distinctive magic.

Topham Tapestries

Pamela Topham's elaborate tapestry landscapes manage to include a surprising amount of subtle color changes for a medium that does not have the versatility of paint. Creating an interesting effect of tangible perspective, the foreground is sometimes embroidered in rougher, woolier, chunkier yarn while the far distance is rendered in fine thread.

There was one particularly riveting piece from Ralph Carpentier, an artist whose work has come to personify the vanishing farmlands of the South Fork, where a lowering sky sweeps down across a sunlit field and farm. It was a delight, as was Marie Warach's "Summer," a bountiful, overflowing garden full of loose, lazy pink and orange blossoms.

Roseann Schwab had some powerful semi-abstract charcoal renditions of urban blight, all threatening shadows and ominous light.

Abstract Offerings

The abstract offerings were confoundingly variable, but Ruth Cohen's "Totem" felt reassuringly right. Its strong shapes of dark blue and yellow on a lighter ground were full of pull and push and tension but added up to a balanced whole that was very satisfying.

In the category of still life, Miriam Dougenis's strong use of color and composition shone out like a beacon, particularly in "Yellow/Orange/Blue," a composition of plant pots, blue striped cloth, and apricots. Also memorable was Julie Henderson's delicate watercolor "Still Life With Pears" with its taut composition of yellow and green pears around a celadon vase.

Among the artists going off on their own trajectories were Ruth Nasca, whose large red, black, and white canvases have women's issues as their focus and strong blocks of color binding their composition, and Liz Gribin's gentle, melancholy figure studies in muted pinks and grays.

Strange Vision

Nicole Bigar's totemic, mythological paintings seem to be moving further along their own songlines every year. Included in her strange vision now are clusters of odd little humunculi, moving or dancing. What's going on here, we wonder?

And lastly, Peggy Watson's wonderful six-foot-by-four-foot "Revolving Door," a New York City streetscape in winter, with yellow cabs and grey slush and a man leaving a revolving door into the kind of icy gloom that awaits us all in a couple of months' time.

The Jimmy Ernst Artists Alliance was founded in 1984 to carry out the vision of the late Mr. Ernst, an East Hampton artist who always had a wish to unite the East End artistic community in some way so as to make its influence felt elsewhere.

Useful And Fun

Eighty-three artists founded the group, to further the interests of local artists, and membership has expanded to include 340 members. Marie Warach is currently president.

The alliance's monthly meetings, held at Guild Hall and always open to the public, include a lecture by a noted artist. Then there is a monthly series of informal gatherings, "Let's Talk Art," held at Ashawagh Hall.

Add to this a well-produced newsletter, the annual exhibit and costume ball, and a studio tour in the summer, and you have a community organization that serves its members usefully while being good fun at the same time.