Take a stroll with Charly Hamilton through the Holiday Show at Annex Gallery Taylor Books
By Charly Jupiter Hamilton with Amy Williams
A blues ditty:
Ladies and gentlemen sitting around here eating cookies
and drinking cheer in a warm Christmas chair,
feeling happy and thinking joyous thoughts
taking in their breath
Who’s that sitting beside you?
It looks like Mr. Death.
Where do you go to find the best variety of art in one location? More than 20 artists are included at the annual Holiday Show in the Annex Gallery at Taylor Books. Better known and lesser known artists including works in every medium imaginable are featured — sculpting, welding, painting, photography, scratchboard, fabric and woodcarving. Whether you want stocking stuffers or big gifts, there’s a selection in prices from $34 to over $1,000.
In a recent meandering through the gallery, artist and art commentator Charly Jupiter Hamilton gave a review of what he likes in the new show… take this art road map and see if you can travel the same path as our art adventurer Charly!
“I always like the Christmas show that Ann and Angie work up at the Taylor Books annex… ahh, the Money’s wild folk art figures floating around. And Joseph Lung’s a genius to me. Peter Massing with his Navy man cool prints… Then I see Jeff Fetty’s snakes - one Christmas past I got one for my sister Betsy and she couldn’t have it in her house with so many memories of black snakes on the farm we grew up with. I love that little drunk Capitol dome of Kathy Boland. And I feel like I fell off the New York city fire escape with Vernon Howell… All those memories lying on my back looking up. I wish I would have thought to weld all that stuff together and be so smart like Mark Blumenstein.
“But I noticed a few skulls looking back from the mirror or maybe I am darkly drawn to that jokey other side stuff… which brings us back to the opening ditty. Earl Gray’s ‘Ten Faces and Two Skulls’ is what’d I’d buy if someone would buy all my stuff… Or some of those Mark girl’s ‘youdoo’ voodoo dolls: I want them all. The day I was viewing the show, there was a rather straight-looking blonde doll ornament with a broken hangar laying in the seat of a Mark Blumenstein sculpture right below the ‘youdoo’ voodoo dolls - looking like all-the-world a reject from her fancy sisters’ party on the wall. SR Rothbery’s ‘Stuck in the Grid’ looks like an everyday you get up death mask. Then you have the decayed flowers of Robin Hammer (he paints nudes too, you know?). .. and the ‘please come to the baptism’ scary scratchboards of Mark Wolfe… I got a small Eric Perdue red-rim cracked pot to put my ashes in - in case I die a little.
“As I am walking out, I see this hilltop home painting by Rudy Chamber… is that a pug dog behind the clever couple standing out front? And who could that be riding off to the mystical mountain with all his canvases on the donkey cart? Maybe Merry Pre-Christmas.”
