My kind of holiday: A celebration of excellent painting at Greenhut

Visitors are met by a wall of works by John Whalley, Welliver and Maurice Freedman – major players all. But this show is about more than big names.

BY DANIEL KANY

I like painting and art exhibitions in which viewers are forced – on their own – to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think this is what many art snobs find so stressful about open-call shows. Something similar occurs in many holidays shows, which many galleries mount at this time of the year. The goal of such shows is to sell gifts: The Christmas season is the key commercial American moment of the year, after all.

If you’re not looking for a gift, these shows can be interesting – or frustrating. Usually, they shift to the side of frustrating. The galleries typically are jam-packed with work, and it’s generally smaller and cheaper than what they feature at other times of the year. In other words, lower impact and lower standards.

So when I drove by Greenhut Galleries in Portland and saw a $50,000 Neil Welliver nude in the front window, I laughed out loud – it was about as far as one could go from the consumable little morsels of a typical holiday show. Moreover, on the next wall hung a quite simply bizarre Alison Goodwin pink and yellow portrait of a moon-goddess-like woman holding garlic scapes. Neither painting is small enough to wrap and put in a box under the tree. And neither is cheap… nor easy. The nude, “Washcloth” (1967), is in the forest. She’s wholesome and outdoorsy, but still well past L.L Bean. The model is pretty, curvy, buxom, pert-nippled and sexually bold. In fact, nestled against her creme-white belly, the border with her black pubic hair is the highest contrast (and therefore the most noticeable) spot of the painting. The center of the image shifts between that high contrast spot and her gaze: Oh yes, she’s fully aware of what you’re looking at and she gazes back with unexpected alacrity.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.pressherald.com/2017/12/24/my-kind-of-holiday-a-celebration-of-excellent-painting-at-greenhut/