Just look at these colors.

From the saturated blues and greens on Susan Chambers' canvases to the shiny figures and patterns on Aaron Calvert's ceramic creatures, "Gone to Seed," an exhibit featuring the two artists at Historic Arkansas Museum's Trinity Gallery, bursts with bright hues.

Both artists find inspiration in the natural world, and their works are joyous and thoughtful.

Chambers uses matte acrylic paint to depict the garden behind the home she shares with her husband, photographer George Chambers, in Little Rock's Quapaw Quarter.

"This series, 'Home Garden,' began in 2016 when I decided to focus exclusively on my garden as the visual source for my painting," she says in her artist's statement. "At the same time, I also became interested in native plants and their importance to the environment."

With careful placement and design, she brings a satisfying order to the sometimes unruly tendencies of flowers, weeds, trees and plants. Stand back from her works and absorb the geometric patterns she uses to build her mandala-like designs, then get close to see the meticulous way she paints stems, leaves, bulbs and petals. There is not a single stroke, mark or hard-edged line out of place.

Her work is flat and tight and her skills with color and design are powerful. The way she layers her subjects and arranges them in patterns gives the viewer a lot of information, yet it is always just the right amount and never overwhelming.

"Crazy Quilt Garden" is an excellent example. A skinny, blue-and-black live oak tree sprouts on the right, while a stone path of orange and blue cuts across the image diagonally; green tomatoes, sunflowers, white lilies and a blue bush grow from the soil and a trellis in the background is covered in vines. It is a crazy quilt of a garden, but structured and neat.

Chambers is standing in that very garden on a recent Wednesday morning. Here is the zig-zaggy live oak, zinnias and other flora, along with her neighbor's house, that appear in her paintings featured in "Gone to Seed."

"Monet had Giverney," she says of the French Impressionist and his garden, "and I've got an Arkansas backyard."

She controls this natural space with her brushes and paint.

"I like to set up order," she says. "I might need a red plant here, and then it's like, OK, what red plants do I have, and then I plant them on the canvas. You can do that with painting."

In "Jackson in the Garden," Chambers' black-and-white titular dog strolls up a path against a cobalt background and alongside sunflowers, red peppers and other plants. "The Artist's Garden" shows Chambers, her back to us, drawing among her plants as robins perch on a blue birdbath, the clouds reflected in its water; "Urban Sanctuary" has plants towering as high as the Little Rock skyline in the background. In "Soliphilia," a robin splashes in the birdbath as a brick pathway is depicted in cool purples and butterflies flutter among gorgeously blooming plants.

Chambers has a bachelor's degree in art from Rhodes College and a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from the University of Georgia and taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Hendrix College and the University of Central Arkansas before retiring and taking up painting full time. She is represented by Boswell Mourot Fine Art in Little Rock and Justus Fine Art Gallery in Hot Springs.

"Susan has been making work for some time at a high level," says Carey Voss, curator of exhibits at Historic Arkansas Museum. "She has always done really high-quality work, but it seems that in the past two or three years, her work has really gone to the next level. It's exceptional."

Calvert teaches art at Henderson State University and lives in Russellville with wife Summer Bruch, head of Arkansas Tech University's art department, and their two daughters, 14-year-old Rumble and Toula, 12. His "Rocket Rabbit" won the Grand Award in the Arkansas Arts Center's 2020 Delta Exhibition.

"I'd been super impressed with Aaron's work in the last couple of Deltas," Voss says. She decided to pair Calvert and Chambers in an exhibit at the suggestion of tapestry artist Louise Halsey.

Like Chambers' paintings, Calvert's ceramics are loaded with information, though his application is looser. With both artists, repeated viewings are rewarded with more revelations from each piece.

Calvert's ceramic figures in "Gone to Seed" range from the raccoon of "Zoom Raccoon Head" to a deer, a bear, a squirrel and a pair of rabbits. Each is brightly decorated with drawings of patterns, figures, codes and phrases and is part of what he calls his "Brain Rattle Series."

"There is so much time late at night in the studio just looking at those things and drawing on them, your brain kind of drifts," says Calvert, who has a bachelor's of fine arts from Kent State University and a master of fine arts in ceramics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. "A lot of times, those are things I'm thinking about as I'm working."

The largest of his "Gone to Seed" pieces is "Da Rabbit," a 40-inch-tall rabbit's head with pointy ears. It has what looks like a face made up of rows of numbers (turns out they are from a daily log Calvert kept of his weight loss); there is also a snake, stars, a checkerboard pattern and a take on Hokusai's "The Great Wave."

It's not all fuzzy rabbits and bears. A lyric from "The Message," the proto-rap song by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, wraps around "Da Rabbit" and a black figure shown in police-chalk outline.

"We do have a lot of stuff going on right now that isn't necessarily great, and I think the colorfulness of my work can kind of camouflage that," Calvert says. "A casual viewer might see it as a fun, happy thing, and there is fun, happy stuff in there, but there is also some darkness as well."

Calvert explains in his artist statement that he leaves the eyes of his ceramic critters as empty holes "to draw attention to the darkness of the interior space. This black space represents something beyond knowing or understanding."

"Take the Weight Buck Head" has ears of corn, honeycomb patterns and lightning bugs on it as well as lyrics from Kool & the Gang's "Who's Gonna Take the Weight."

Calvert, who grew up in the small town of Litchfield, Ohio, was an Eagle Scout and is a competitive fisherman. "Big 'Un" is a whopper of a fish covered in patterns, a yellow snake and the question "How high's the water, Bobby?" Bobbers, fish and lures also show up on his other pieces.

"Gone to Seed," which opened May 14 and will be up until Aug. 22, was actually booked before the pandemic and was postponed, Voss says. Its timing now couldn't be more serendipitous.

"The way it worked out was amazing," she says. "We have this show that is opening at the same time that our society is reopening and we're coming out of this long, metaphorically dark period. And it's a show that seems to be a lot about possibility and renewal and the regenerative power of nature."

Print Headline: Nature's palette

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