What happened? Well, the official story -- I like to call it the cock-and-bull version -- is that Cerri needed a change. The truth is that the newish director of the museum, Jerry Gilmore, pushed out the old-timer.
I suppose Gilmore has the right to shape the institution in his image, but he did one thing that strikes me as pretty darn petty. He personally excluded Cerri from the Arvada Center's dinner honoring Sampson. To add insult to injury, the festivities were held not in some banquet room, but in the middle of the show Cerri had just put together!
"Jonah and the Big Fish," by Frank Sampson, acrylic
on canvas, Sandy Carson Gallery.
"Precious Crossing," by Frank Sampson, oil and
acrylic on canvas, Arvada Center.
Details
Frank Sampson RetrospectiveThrough November 16
Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Boulevard
720-898-7200
Frank Sampson: Recent
Paintings
Through October
24
andy Carson Gallery, 760
Santa Fe Drive
303-573-8585
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Cerri did go to the opening, and I praise him for that. His ex-boss Gilmore may not give him a richly deserved pat on the back for his efforts (let alone a free meal of rubber chicken), but he does get praise from Sampson -- and, incidentally, from me.
If the Frank Sampson Retrospective brings us up to date on the Boulder artist's career from 1948 to last year, the exhibit at Sandy Carson Gallery, Frank Sampson: Recent Paintings, brings us up to last month.
Though Sampson is 75, he's still quite active in the studio. In fact, when I called him last week, he was hard at work on his latest painting. "I'm one of those artists with that crazy drive to work," Sampson says, "and I'm pretty prolific, working in the studio a lot. I didn't have my own family, so I've had more time to paint."
The latest paintings are clearly a continuation of Sampson's long interest in telling stories, in using figures as key components in his paintings, and in creating sumptuous, complicated surfaces. However, the paintings at Sandy Carson are darker and moodier in subject and palette than most of the older work showing at the Arvada Center.
A major theme in these paintings is water. In the front window of the gallery is "Jonah and the Big Fish," a heroically scaled acrylic on canvas done mostly in shades of blue depicting an enormous fish eating a man. The story of Jonah is from the Bible, but most of the pictures here refer to fables, myths and fairy tales, as in the superb "They Sailed Away for a Year and a Day," with four men in a sailboat, and the intriguing "The Blind Lead the Blind," a line of blind men crossing a bridge. Both are done in acrylic on canvas.
The Sampson show at Sandy Carson makes a perfect chaser for the historical feature at the Arvada Center. However, the Sandy Carson show closes in a couple weeks, well before the one at Arvada, which comes down next month. If I were you, I'd get around to seeing them both real soon.
