Teaching Pages

Roger Brown’s painting Forest Fire presents a mysterious scene. Cloud-like trees arranged in four neatly scalloped rows form a vast landscape of overlapping hills.

Two very different neighborhoods are depicted in Roger Brown’s oil paintings Sudden Avalanche and Mountain Sites, but in both scenes nature and humans are on a collision course. Silhouetted residents can be glimpsed through lighted windows, while outside in the natural world, people are having experiences that are key to unfolding stories.

The torn paper fragments in this curious collage by Ray Yoshida appear to represent a collection of something. Thirty-eight irregularly shaped pieces of paper have been carefully arranged and pasted in five rows, loosely increasing in size and shifting form from tier to tier.

At first glance this colorful scene appears idyllic. Lawn chairs with matching fuchsia and orange stripes recline near a path of light. The lemon sky is turning orange and pink, with streaks of purple and lime.

In this cut-paper collage by Ray Yoshida, over 180 individually excised pieces float against a flat pale-gray background. The pasted fragments appear to be evenly distributed across the large rectangular composition.

Some Other Tree and Sites Unscene display Gladys Nilsson’s delight in creating puzzling spaces crowded with interacting figures, and scenes where sizes of people and objects defy natural proportions.

Frida Kahlo painted Still Life: Pitahayas in 1938 when she was thirty-one years old. It was painted with oil on aluminum, the traditional materials used in Mexico for religious altar paintings, known as ex-votos and retablos, which a supplicant would offer to a saint to acknowledge an answered prayer.

In A One Act Play, the familiar comic book hero Wonder Woman is confronted by another female character whose blonde hair, beaded necklace, and wrist cuff help identify her as Wonder Woman’s major adversary Queen Clea, ruler over parts of the underwater world of Atlantis.

At once beautiful and mysterious, the paintings of Erik Weisenburger enchant viewers with their luscious color and intricate detail. Upon first glance, his painting Ursa Memoriam may recall traditional still-life or historical painting, but closer inspection reveals a contemporary voice that presents timeless subjects in new contexts.

In Ellen Lanyon’s 1982─83 painting Chromos: Winter I, Autumn II, Spring III, Summer IV, four separate canvases function together as a single work of art that depicts the four seasons. Though Lanyon uses distinct colors and symbols to represent the individual seasons, she links the four separate paintings into a coherent whole by repeating the same motifs.