SUNDAY FEBRUARY 18, 2018
The Reading Eagle
Rybarczyk and White explore gender forms in 'New Nudes.'
The exhibition is on display through March 9 at Freedman Gallery at Albright College.
WRITTEN BY BY RON SCHIRA - READING EAGLE CORRESPONDENT
If you go
What: “New Nudes” by Paul Rybarczyk and Lauralynn White
Where: Freedman Gallery of Albright College Center for the Arts, 13th and Bern streets.Hours: 9 a.m to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday; 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday.For additional information: Call 610-921-7541 or visit www.albright.edu/CenterfortheArts.
Currently viewing through March 9 at the Freedman Gallery at Albright College Center for the Arts is the work of two painters, each dedicated to the process of depicting the naked human form. The exhibition, titled "New Nudes," showcases the acrylics of Paul Rybarczyk and the oils of Lauralynn White. Both artists are avowed figuralists but approach subjects differently, or reflexively rather, as each only represents his or her own gender, respectively, for this show.
Rybarczyk lives in Buffalo, N.Y., and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in art history and figure drawing. Afterward, he worked for over two decades as an art director and copywriter for an advertising firm, and in 1995, he became a licensed massage therapist. In 2008, he built a studio and returned to art. It appears that much of his work is accomplished very quickly, his hand guided by instinct and spontaneity as he deliberates solely on the male form in varying, likely staged poses. It is also interesting to note that most of his figures are seen in the alluring poses typically associated with female models. A classic artist/model theme, he pursues this paint-worthy method throughout the show while utilizing decisive and well-placed brushstrokes in each work's facture. Many of his pieces, "Sweet Dreams," or "Teddy," for example, are intentionally sketchy, yet their painterly texture and exuberant color give the pieces an implacable energy.
Lauralynn White is well known in the area as gallery director for the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts. She earned a bachelor's degree in fine art from Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, and is an exhibiting member of the National Association of Women Artists. During the summer, she works with the visual arts in Chautauqua, N.Y. For this exhibition, White's paintings adapt the female figure into archetypes that explore the connection of women to nature. In this context, the feminine form is portrayed in languid poses that become morphed or embedded within trees or landscapes.
To her, this offers a symbolic notion of unity among women and the environment, or to otherwise specific states of being. A painting such as "Horizon" presents the nude form as present but indistinguishable from the hills in front of a distant mountain range. Her latest efforts are completed on the grained wood surfaces of hollowed wooden doors and sawed-off slabs of maple trees. For these pieces, she finds the sway of a hip or the curve of a breast and brings out the figure, or figures, hidden or concealed in the wood. Using grays, shades of brown and wood varnishes, she incurs a semi-minimalist work of winsome girls as they swim or rise, metaphysically like spirits, through the texture of the wood.
An artwork titled "New Growth," for instance, is on a slab of maple and has a couple of young ladies rising upward from a large knot in the dark lower left. In the center of the knot, however, is a curled fetus waiting to be born. Possibly the unspoken goal of this exhibition is to bring attention to similarities, not differences, between the male and female gazes.