Gallery West show: multi-media

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Sara Cogswell has created an Art Appreciation short course at Gallery West, 134 State Street, by showcasing works – with equines as subjects – in nearly every medium art has to offer.

Stephen Chesley’s charcoals accentuate the musculature of the horse, Redbird, who is a main character in “The Doom of Ravenswood” by South Carolina’s inaugural poet laureate, Archibald Rutledge. Chesley already has illustrated several of Rutledge’s nearly forgotten stories for re-release by the University of South Carolina Press (in partnership with the SC Humanities Council) as collectors’ books. Chesley’s illustrations for all the chapbooks to date have been done in charcoal; for other exhibitions, his paintings are executed in oils and he also works in metal, graphite, and has been known to pull a lithograph as well.

Glenn Saborosch keeps to the one medium he feels called by: metal sculpture. With wire or strips of steel and encouragement from his welding torch, he gets his horses moving in ways that solidify their gaits and their high-spirited dispositions.

Janet Kozachek has worked and does work in so many mediums it is dizzying to visit her website or her blog. For this show the simplicity of her pencil on paper is elevated to a level of intellectual sophistication in her drawings.

Lynn Tanner rendered a docile donkey in pastels. Tanner, who lives near the Tanner Outlet in Rutherfordton, NC, has ample livestock to pose, pastorally speaking, as her live models. She only took up donkey painting when the pasture close by was vacated by all the neighbors’ cows.

Andrea Hennings, for this show, reveals her talent in paintings, working in acrylics. Janet Oliver represents the medium of printmaking and also has paintings to contribute to the overall equine theme. And Marie Stone van Vuuren worked in watercolors to render a whimsical zebra, an equine cousin to the other pieces on view throughout the concisely curated gallery space.

You can see works in all these mediums corralled in one show with a scheduled duration of nearly two months. And, if you happen to like horses, or their cousins, you will more thoroughly appreciate how Cogswell’s choice of artists created such winning subjects, using their chosen media.