By Myles Ludwig
Imagination is abloom at the Palm Beach Fine Craft Show at the Convention Center.
It is a springy bouquet of masterfully individualized techniques and unexpectedly fused materials – textiles, woods, wire, mesh, beads, stone, ceramics, and glass and more — that have come together in a magical display of exciting, surprising forms that erase the imaginary line between art and craft.
If there is one ribbon that holds this airy bouquet of beauty together, it is the ribbon of narrative.
The most engaging pieces are telling an intriguing and enriching story. It is a story that flows from their makers’ passion and defies the common language of words, though their makers are eager to share their handiwork and retell the stories of its creation, its meaning or its poem — and their own joy.
This is work that soars above what one might think of craft. This is Haute Craft or some new kind of form that is badly in need of a rebranding.
I can’t remember seeing such an assemblage of artists so happy about their work, and rightly so. I can’t remember seeing a show as inspiring as this. Critique has no place in this place of appreciation. It’s as if a merry band of Old Masters had woken up from the Renaissance and descended from their hallowed walls, put aside their favorite brushes and colors and notions of chiaroscuro and picked up beads, wire, gold and porcelain to fire up a new kind of painting.
There are the whimsical decorative teapots done in a matte-like glaze that emulates earthy pewter from the Alabama studio of cheerfully mischievous Beer Chunhaswasdikul, including one that looks something like a lawnmower engine but fulfills the requisite form of the genre with lid and spout. There are elegantly exuberant ropes of beads and gold and woven gold wire medallions that achieve a kind of undeniable rococo spectacle in the hands of Vicki Eisenfeld.
Marianne Hunter uses a technique she describes as akin to sand painting to fashion her painted enamel pieces that might have been flecks from a Klimt, each with its own engraved poem. Victor Dinovi’s finely polished, satiny and gently wrought wood sculptures purport to be functional as chairs and lounges, and they are, but could just as easily stand to be admired as pure form in any setting.
Bozenna and Lukasz Bogucki have constructed high-fashion evening purses of the most delicate industrial stainless mesh with blowtorched moiré patterns that shimmer like the aurora borealis. Graceful urns of porcelain are topped by inviting sculpted mythical forms by Debra Steidel.
The essential curvilinear shape of the kimono has been deconstructed by Susan Bradley and deftly formed in curious fabrics like neoprene with luxurious detachable brocade collars. The combination of found objects and porcelain anthropomorphic figurines by Kirsten Stingle is frankly startling and mystical.
Then there are the totemic assemblies of sculpted gold and stone fragments by Linda Kindler Priest that can adorn, ornament, or be set within a frame and mounted on a deserving wall and the carefully honed ambiguity created by the harmonious fusion of raku copper sand glass vessels and woven fibers that Marc Jenesel and Karen Pierce call jewelry for the home.
The aesthetic experience of being involved in a great painting can create a Stendahlian frisson, but the difference is these are works are that caress your personality. You can join them. You can belong to them. You can admire a great painting, but these are works that romance and seduce.
These are works you can love.
The 11th Annual Palm Beach Fine Craft Show runs until 6 p.m. today and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, 650 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Admission is $15, $14 for seniors. For more information, visit http://www.craftsamericashows.com/PALM_main.htm.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.