VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Gallery presents Caliente: Full Frontal Color featuring new paintings from artist donna e perkins. The exhibit is on view May 7 through June 2, 2011. The artist will be on hand to visit with guests during the exhibition opening reception on Saturday, May 7, 5 – 8 p.m. at the gallery, with Artist Talk at 5:30 p.m.  Light refreshments provided by Hot Mamas.

“I steal lines and choreograph them into the structure of my paintings,” states Perkins. Her lines are drawn from dancers dancing and her paintings become abstractions, not of the dancers, but of the dance and movement. For Perkins, “dance is primal, primitive and beyond reason, a ritualized form of expressing desire and animal need.” For her, the painting process is a passionate, wordless dance with the tactile sensuality of graphite and paint.

After seven years of painting canvases in blacks, whites and grays, Perkins has submerged herself in color - hot color. In her Caliente series she revels in the sensuousness of intense color that develops when she layers paint onto her canvas. This recent series employs splendid, even decadent colors, with no discernible subject matter, rioting in space.

The lines in the Caliente series were drawn at rehearsals of Frame Dance Productions (www.framedance.org ). Choreographer and dancer Lydia Hance will present sections of her dance work Mortar, Sylphs Wrote, made possible by a Hope Stone, Inc. HopeWerks residency grant, at Archway Gallery on Saturday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m.

Perkins finds that she is continuously inspired by dancers and their choreography and it informs her paintings. For her 2009 Entanglements show at Archway Gallery, Perkins collaborated with choreographer/dancer jhon r stronks.

When Perkins was small enough to stand in the church pew, her parents gave her paper and pencil to keep her quiet during services. In junior high she was given oil paints. She’s been drawing and painting ever since. After earning a Master’s Degree from the University of Houston at Clear Lake, Perkins taught art in public schools for 20 years. She is now a full time artist and has been a member of Archway Gallery since 2008.

Pictured: detail Caliente Lioness by donna e perkins. (full image below)