March 15, 2005 – Mango Tango Art Gallery unveils the new works of Kathy Carlson and Mandy Thody on March 18, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The public is invited to the champagne reception honoring the artists. Adding to the evening's celebration, 2 Blue Shoes will perform interpretive blues and rock 'n' roll.
Both Carlson and Thody have been working with the gallery for three years. Carlson, a retired educator, began painting realistic oil-on-canvas paintings of island life. Fishermen, market women, and children at the beach filled her canvases. Three aspects of her works caught collectors' attention. Strong compositions that suggest a story, superb use of color, and signature luminosity comprise a Carlson painting.
Self-taught, Thody exhibited portraiture in watercolor in her first group show. She was able to capture both the likeness of her subject and the inner spirit of that subject with technical finesse. The next year she began working at the Maho Clay Center on St. John. The people that she had worked so hard to capture on paper turned into magnificent busts in sculpture made with the raku process. For Thody, all drawing, painting and sculpting are equally well suited to giving visual form to her ideas and feelings.
Carlson offers three groupings of art. One is the rites of passage. Included are paintings of birth, marriage, baptism, and death. Another division of her paintings is a transformation of reality into mythology. Her mocko jumbies become jumbies and her swimmers become a merman and mermaid. Her last grouping is that of still life. The influence of W.B. Thompson, with whom she shared studio space for a few months, is very evident in her colorful florals.
Thody works are watercolors and ceramic sculpture. Her portraits of Carib Indians are convincing illusions of man's connection to nature. Her heavily shadowed elders and their women and children are painted with symbolic backgrounds. The mortals seem to blend into spirits of the forest. In sculpture she has created table-top works, bas relief panels, and high relief faces. Her works remind one of the famed sculptor Isamu Nogochi's rhetorical question: "What is the artist but the channel through which spirits descend – ghosts, visions, portents, the tinkling of bells?"
The show continues for one month. For St. John art lovers, there will be a free shuttle to Red Hook at 8:20pm.
For more information call 777-3060, or CLICK HERE to learn more about the gallery.