Overlapping Connections

Cecilia Villanueva                         Erik Hagen 

January 8 -  April 6, 2020

Located in an exclusive members’ club, please contact for more details:   

Hannekehumphreyart@gmail.com

Cecilia Villanueva and Erik Hagen capture sensitive perspectives of the world and how humanity affects it. Paintings resembling aerial maps grapple with human movement and environmental impacts.  The pure physicality of their work is also palpable. They share the love of exploring new processes with landscapes that become constructions, straddling painting and sculpture.

But in Overlapping Connections, they have stretched beyond these clear commonalities. The show includes diptyques they have actually created together, highlighting their inclusive and inquisitive natures. Here they have truly overlapped, sharing resources, relinquishing control, building upon each other’s input, and integrating new processes.

The towering verticality of these pieces is arresting, making them appear as abstract slivers of our world as seen from an airplane. A feast of textures, complex lines, and delightfully delicate color invite the viewer to discover the undiscovered. 

Terra Incognita is an exploration of the land, but also a discovery of working with another artist, in respect of the other’s mark.  Land and Oceanic Reflections muses on how little is known of nature despite all the technology at hand. 

Cecilia Villanueva’s paintings are informed by the blue prints she received from her father, an architect in Mexico City. Hers is an ongoing study of the interactions between people, buildings, and the landscape.  The blue hue permeates pieces, imparting a calm, meditative quality. And the viewer is drawn in by the intricate tracing of lines and myriad of texture created with ink, oil stick, graphite, and collage.  

The paintings also convey life across different cultures and places, in Mexico, the Chaco culture, and Texas.  Grid-like forms suggest order, but also disorder and impossible architecture. She paints the galloping growth of Mexico City built on Tenochtitlan Island.  Houston appears as a dandelion from the sky, beautiful and fragile.  

Even her own daily routine in Houston is mapped.  Both a personal diary of the unremarkable and historical record of one’s movement. The tracing covers a four-mile radius, illustrating how people hover in limited areas, which become home.  

Erik Hagen has an engineer’s sensibility in referencing geological processes like sedimentation and erosion to evoke the earth’s history. He blurs time, exploring Deep Time before human existence and humanity’s role in the planet.

 Paintings roll with hills, valleys, and rivers, resembling topographical maps.  The Forgotten Landscape series portray the future when traces of humanity have been erased.  A time when nature reigns and is resplendent with glacial lakes, created by embedding jewel-like resin in paintings. His process mirrors that of sedimentation, with slowly built up layers of hydrostone and paint glazes as well as random surprises from pourings.  

Other pieces glow with light in ornate frames, giving them a precious feel. Yet they include artifacts found along Houston’s bayous or once valuable, but now discarded, possessions. Working as a collagist and combining the old with the new, he hints at the transitory nature of life, the futility of consumption.  

© All rights reserved 2018. Hanneke Humphrey

For more information on the artists:

http://www.ceciliavillanueva.com

https://www.erikhagenstudio.com

 Hannekehumphreyart@gmail.com

This wonderful show is still up, enlivening the walls during times of distancing. There is new individual work and the collaborative work of Cecilia and Erik is inspiring!

Blaine Davis and Charles Tanner

Opening reception: Sunday September 15, 4:30-6

We’ve reached capacity and can no longer take any rsvp’s.

If you are interested in coming at a later date, please write:

hannekehumphreyart@gmail.com                            

Exploration and Synergy

This  show brings together the work of two print makers working in Houston, Blaine Davis and Charles Tanner.  Sharing an interest in similar themes and the exploration of process, they both have a quiet artistic sensitivity.  Their art depicts the beauty of the natural world, flowing abstract shapes, as well as other lands and cultures.  

Just as the world is diverse, they experiment with multiple palettes, styles, and techniques.  From joyous, colorful portrayals of our world, they move to  more monochromatic, meditative palettes.  Some prints take on ambiguous meanings, whereas others are full of stronger, representational lines and shapes.

The prints are built up through layering techniques and textures, making them complex and mesmerizing.  Looking closely at individual pieces, one may detect different etching techniques, echos of found objects that were run through the printing press, and even hand coloring.  Developing prints in this way can be an organic, spontaneous, and sometimes random process. Accidents are often cultivated as they lead the artist in new directions.

Blaine and Charles often work side by side, and their exchange of ideas adds to the synergy of their work.  While both led careers outside of art, they were drawn to print making early on. They studied print making at the Glassell School decades ago and now work at Burning Bones. Founded by Carlos Hernandez and Pat Masterson in 2011, it is a cooperative printing press in the Heights district of Houston.

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Blaine Davis describes his intaglio process as “controlled accidents” because he  often does not know what is going to happen until starting to see an image develop. His work is predominantly copper plate etchings and linocuts. He uses a variety of techniques, often many on the same plate, including aquatint, soft ground, hard ground, chine colle’ and others.  

Having made prints for over 30 years, he has participated in numerous print shows, including the “The Burning Bones Press: A Selection of Prints” at the Moody Gallery, Houston (2019), “Burning Bones Press: Collective Pulse” at the Galveston Arts Center (2017), a group show in Glassell’s Perimeter Gallery (2014), and a number of student shows at the Glassell. 

Beyond print work, he is  also a weaver.  The two practices are complementary, and his prints often become inspirational for his cloth and tapestry work.  In September of 2018 he spent the month of September in Iceland doing a residency in tapestry.  His work was represented at the Icelandic Textile Institute in Blundous, Iceland  (Sept. 2018). Blaine holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin and an MLS from the University of Texas Austin.  He worked as librarian at the Houston Public Library for 25 years.

Charles Tanner is inspired by contemporary artists, for whom printmaking was a significant part of their oeuvre such as Hockney, Motherwell, Johns, Dine, Frankenthaler and others. In this  show, the series of hearts is reminiscent of Jim Dine’s  Romantic Expressionism style, and Homage, the piece with a series of numbers, is a tribute to Jasper Johns.  Many pieces remind us of the Abstract Expressionists.

Charles studied printmaking at The Glassell School 30 years ago and currently makes prints at Burning Bones Press, Houston.  His work was included in the group exhibition, "Twenty-Five Years of Printmaking at The Glassell School" (YEAR) and in a by-faculty-invitation group exhibition in The Perimeter Gallery of The Glassell School (2014). Having studied literature, Charles holds a BA in Literature from Rice University and an MA in Literature from the University of Texas at Austin.  He also earned a law degree (JD) from University of Houston.  He has retired from a family manufacturing business.