A friend and I went to the Arkansas Arts Center yesterday afternoon. It had been awhile - maybe six months - since I last went. People don't often suspect that Little Rock has much in the way of art, but you'd be surprised. The Arts Center has expanded exponentially in the past few years as local donations have kicked in, and the three current exhibits are all worth seeing. I wish I knew more about art theory so I could think more critically when I go. Mostly, I just wander around and enjoy myself. I feel a little odd writing about it here, but I want to be able to remember.

The piece above won the 46th Annual Delta Exhibition, which is a juried show open to artists from Arkansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas. The scan above doesn't do it justice, since you aren't able to read all the bits written on it, which include a battle of aphorisms between Nietzche and Michael Jackson. Several professors from UALR were also in the show, as well as a number of Arkansas artists that I've grown up watching. I've been to the Delta Exhibition for the past several years, but this year is the best one that I remember.

The second gallery we walked through featured Edwin Dickinson. He started his career in the teens with wonderful, dark, moody oils (that are apparently impossible to find on the net.) Then he moved on to allegorical pieces and portraits in the thirties and forties, before finally segueing into landscapes, some of which are lovely graphite-on-paper bits, and some of which are very 1950's-American-in-Europe oils. I'm not all that fond of his later work, but those very early oils and their profound shadows - those are the most memorable ones. I sat in front of them until Gina had wandered off several rooms down.

Warren Criswell is a Central Arkansas artist whom I've followed for several years. The first pieces of his that I saw were of dark southern roads, hanging in a gallery in Hot Springs several years ago. I've kept an eye out for shows ever since. I love his work, and don't think I understand it nearly as well as I might. Yesterday, I got fascinated by three little monotypes, especially this one, called Double Indemnity, and this other one, entitled Don Giovanni Impenitente, and Moths. There's something about the suspended figures in each one - they don't look particularly perturbed to be falling or flying. He only had one room for his show, though. I wish it had been bigger.

It was good to just look, since I don't often get a chance to spend a couple of hours being completely visual. And it was a nice change from reading theory. There is some Foucault for today, of course:

The observing gaze refrains from intervening; it is silent and gestureless. Observation leaves things as they are; there is nothing hidden to it in what is given. The correlative of observation is never the invisible, but always the immediately visible, once one has removed the obstacles erected to reason by theories and to the senses by the imagination. (The Birth of the Clinic, 107)