The Cosumnes River College Art Gallery held an opening reception on Friday for its newest exhibit called “Time & Place.”
The exhibit was curated by Art Professor Geri Donovan and featured artwork from three artists based in Sacramento and Rocklin.
“You have all of these images and they’re not used in a traditional way, they’re more abstract, but you still recognize things that you see in real life,” Donovan said. “You see them go from color to black and white and it breaks down into structure and then it blossoms out into color again.”
Artist Jeff Armstrong’s work consisted of black and white drawings that were titled “Chaos.” He spoke about his drawing called “Chaos Expands,” and that his goal is to not draw any object or any thing.
“It starts off as a scribble and it begins to take shapes, but it never becomes something, occasionally it does, but I don’t start off drawing,” Armstrong said. “In 2016, when we had the election, it looked like the world was about to spin out of control, so if you’re thinking of things spinning out of control, going crazy, being broken, being shattered and nothing fitting or working together again, that’s pretty much chaos.”
Artist Ronald Walker’s work featured colorful drawings that are suburban primitive, which combines the origins of art with primitive art. Most of his drawings had to do with animals.
Walker talked about his artwork called “Not that Hungry” which is a picture of a mouth with a horse inside of it.
“This kind of came off the idea of ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,’ so next, I know I’m messing around drawing kind of like Romanesque style horses that just developed from there, so I have a mouth with a horse going in it,” Walker said.
Artist Larry Williams’s artwork consisted of colorful paintings that had to do with abstract compositions that he describes as visual conversations that are informed by the shapes, lines and patterns that he encounters and is attracted to, according to his artist biography statement.
Williams spoke about his colorful portrait format painting called “Presumptuous,” which means going beyond what is acceptable or permitted.
“In my paintings, they’re like conversations. I’m looking for a word that comes to mind, so it’s like then we’re taking that word and I’m having a conversation with the painting about the definition or what that word means to me,” Williams said. “So, for me in the painting, there’s lots of marks. I tend to apply a lot of paint and use different brushwork.”
Antonio Osorio Santiago, 26, an art history and studio art major said he liked Walker’s artwork.
“He uses a lot of recognizable images in his works,” Osorio Santiago said. “Each individual image still does contain its own story.”
The exhibit will be available until Nov. 3.