art beat / By Katherine Almy

Freedom to Wonder

(April 19, 2007)  This is a story about place and the relationship of two artists to their place. One grew up moving around the United States and eventually around the world. His father worked for the United Nations and so the artist, as a boy, lived in Burma, Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Turkey. He grew up under the influence of the various cultures - “not so much studying them, as living with them. Seeing architecture and costumes and jewelry and museums and ruins.” He also spent a lot of time alone, out in nature doing “fanciful things.” That was Richard Duning’s experience.

Duning’s good friend Harry Blumenthal grew up in Atlanta. When Blumenthal was a boy, Atlanta was still a relatively small town and surrounded by woods. He and his pals spent most of their free time in the woods, and got to know them intimately. There were certain places they were drawn to, others were carefully avoided. Some trees were inviting and others were not. There were specific places on the creek, the stones from which were like money to the boys. Blumenthal had a deep connection to the landscape of his youth, and it was all taken away at the age of 12. Much later in life, he realized what that meant to him.

Harry Blumenthal and Richard Duning

GALLERY >

“When we lose our connections with our Earth Mother,” he says, “there is always suffering because that connection is an aspect of our truth.” At the age of 12, he had to leave his original landscape. He grew up, he came to know other landscapes, he became a painter. He studied and practiced his art for many years and then changed careers. He became a psychotherapist and did not paint for several years. It may sound strange, but this worked well for his painting. “My art had become painfully tight,” he says.

Then, about a year and a half ago, he started to “learn to paint all over again.” In his artist’s statement, he quotes T. S. Eliot to describe the process: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

But just as he was coming back to his painting, he was also coming around to the landscape of his youth. Not physically, but in spirit. The connection to the land and the importance of that connection started making itself apparent in his work.

So now these two men bring together their story of connections and disconnections to the world around them. Their paintings and sculptures are on exhibit at Piante Gallery in Eureka through May 3. Each has a room of his own work and one room combines the work of the two.

Duning is larger than life, with a rich deep voice, masses of silver jewelry and a dramatic visage. His work is like him - nothing about it is timid. His oversized canvases are thick with impasto, the colors are rich and contrast strikingly. His smaller works are done loosely and are reminiscent of simple, elegant Chinese brush painting, but the brashness is still there. He works intuitively and primarily from imagination. His figures, he says, are done from a model, but he does not have the model hold a pose. They often dance or move about the studio, and you can see that in the way he draws or paints them. And with this bold hand, his work, “is the imagination exploring the fact that we share much of our genome with all the other forms of life on this planet.”

Blumenthal’s work is more complicated. Full of colors and symbols, each one is bursting with concepts. Blumenthal thinks too much for his own good. I’m guessing it’s a burden on him at times, but it works well in his art. It’s not “painfully tight,” anymore. Like Duning, Blumenthal works intuitively, often turning the canvases or painting over the work in order to “allow an image to come from the unconscious.”

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