Selects from The Other Art Fair

Tamara White:

The great-granddaughter of a landscape artist, Booker T. Washington graduate Tamara White is a prolific Dallas painter. Her work is among many corporate and private art collections spanning the US, including award-winning Chef Kent Rathbun and his wife restaurateur Tracy Rathbun, 7-11’s corporate collection, and even Queen Latifah’s personal collection. Seduced by the lushness of oil, she applies the paint generously creating texture that brings life to her limitless palette. Though most of her paintings are abstract, small imagery may appear. Instead of using solvents to dilute the paint White applies the color straight from the tube using a palette knife as an extension of her hand. Keeping the paint thick, she lets each color determine what happens next through the varied viscosity inside the paint. Within each of White’s painting, something new is discovered and are recognized by the substance and depth.

Melissa Herrington:

Melissa Herrington creates mixed media paintings that oscillate between the representational and the abstract. Using oil, acrylics, resin, and occasionally found fibers, her paintings explore concepts emergence, layering, and life. Some pieces appear raw and stripped bare. Others evoke a visual field of depth and motion through nests of negative space. Images are subverted by erasures of solid fields of mostly tan or off white hues. Forms appear familiar—spheres, ribbons, knots, spider webs, tree branches, teardrops, eggs—but are put into new contexts as they settle amongst intricately rendered lines, delicate strands wrapping bodies and colors as though floating across the surface. Herrington paints suggestively. Objects and images are never too explicit, this “unfinished” fluidity, represents an unfolding of new possibilities. This increases their capacity to evoke a wide range of associations and recollections. As she fuses dreamlike meanings and delicate drawings. Her paintings utilize their own system of mark-making that gain meaning through crafted interruptions. Tension exists between background and foreground, between figures and signs. This tension hints at a coherent completion of a form, but never permits full realization. The result is a contemporary visual portmanteau. Floating colors and unsteady shapes blend on the surface of spilling muted tones and marks are meticulously irregular appearing as though left unintentionally by a trace.

Ernesto Ibanez:

Ibanez’s sculptures are imbued with an irony that results from the artist’s choice of materials, mostly nails. A distinguishing characteristic of these unique creatures is that their coats are metallic and shiny, rather than soft and plush. In an act of inversion, Ibañez simulates animal fur or bird feathers using ordinary carpentry nails. To achieve his desired effect, he developed a labor-intensive process of bending the nails with a press and then inserting the heads into openings in sections of mesh that are then screwed to foam core carved in the shape of a particular animal. Appendages, such as tails, ears or beaks, are made from metal or fiberglass, and they are often painted in bold, colorful geometric patterns. For Ibañez, this geometry refers to the cosmos at large—a subject of his large abstract paintings—and thus links the animals to the spiritual world.

Judith Seay:

Judith Seay was born in Dallas.  She received her fine arts degree from SMU. Jerry Bywaters, one of the Dallas Nine, and some of the other professors influenced the Dallas Museum of Art and the Mid Century contemporary art scene in Dallas.   Judith broadened her artistic horizon by studying at UT and UNT her painting teachers at SMU were DeForest Judd and Stephen Wilder She has created her own style in which you may see influences of the Dallas Regionalists. She has brought that artistic fervor into the 21st century with adventurous paths in her paintings.  

Jammie Holmes:

Holmes was also a pick of Rebecca Wilson, Saatchi Art Chief Curator. Holmes is a Dallas-based artist and has built a body of work in the city. His paintings are raw with emotions and provide the viewer with an inside look into Holmes’ mind. His pieces touch on religious, political and contemporary issues. Additionally, his paintings are also reflections of his upbringing and life events around the world. He currently has artwork being showcased abroad at Mega Art Gallery in Italy.

Melanie Norris:

Melanie lives and works in rural North Carolina, outside of Asheville. Her work looks at portraiture from different angles and uses the face as a ground for abstraction and exploration of the psyche. The bold, expressive strokes in oil underscore the delicate ephemera of the watercolor.