Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Review of One World, Two Visions Exhibit


The following is a review of the recent exhibit my mother, Maria A. Morales, Chester County artist, and I held at the Chester County Art Association.  I would like to thank the author of the article, Catherine Quillman, for her honesty and beautiful description of the work displayed in the exhibit, One World, Two Visions.  It was a wonderful experience to hold a show with my mother, a source of my education with nature and art.  I would also like to thank Karen Delaney and Darcy Goldberg for their continued support and encouragement in making this exhibit become a reality.

From the Blog - Fig - posted on June 12, 2014 by Catherine Quillman.

 ...Also on display, in a separate gallery, is a mother/son exhibit featuring the respective paintings and photography of Maria A. Morales and Luis A. Morales.

Maria is a longtime exhibitor in Chester County who may be the only area artist (after the late Dennis Haggerty) who has found success with work centered on the distinctive colors and themes of the American Southwest, even at a time in the 1980s and 1990s when art buyers were enthralled with the Brandywine tradition.  Over the years, Maria has been loyal to her trademark style while continuing to expand her focus by introducing new work in a series that might include images of Caribbean or (as seen in this show) Ecuadorean women. (The women and their multi-fabric-clad babies are especially endearing).

The ideal of a dual show was stroke of ingenuity, especially since you get to see how mother and son have the same gift for finding that certain gesture or detail that makes interesting art.  (Thoreau’s famous quote is “simplify, simplify, simplify" comes to mind, though I always wondered about his need for repetition.) 

Digital photographers interested in “straight” photography (without too much Photoshop) will find Luis A. Morales’ composition skills to be of particular interest.  The landscape, “We Are Four,” for instance, captures what could have been an ordinary group of trees if they were not depicted at a distance where the dips in a field show their branchy forms at different heights.  There are also many floral works, several with incredible close-ups such as “Crown ~n~ White” that reveals how the pistils of a flower really look like that of a crown.

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