Art in the Atrium, Franklin Crossing, features noted Bend artists Mark Edward Fuller’s New Coordinates and Randal Fyfe Leigh’s Parietal Art and Petroglyph Suite through July 29. The artists will attend the July 6 public opening.
Mark Edward Fuller, recognized throughout the Northwest, presents,”New Coordinates – a series of my recent paintings dealing with chaos and confusion in a search for unity and integration in the modern world, I wrestle with time and memory, facts and fiction, and present the viewer with clues, templates and examples of my quest for balance.”
Known for his bold paintings featuring pop-icons, graffiti and comic book art, Fuller built a distinguished career while living in Seattle including his receipt of the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) respected Betty Bowen Award. The annual award honors one visual artist of the Northwest with a cash prize and an exhibit of a selection of the honoree’s art at SAM. During this time, Microsoft and SAM also selected the artist’s work for their permanent collections.
After this period in Seattle, and a self-described “period off the grid” reviewing his life and career, Fuller moved to Bend. Here, he recently reports, “coming out of the shadows and displaying a new lease on life and art.”
The artist comments, “I channeled my energy into art, experiencing it as medicine…composing these new creations,” describing his recent collection of work for the July exhibit. Change is apparent as the pop-icons yield to bold abstracted imagery, arranged in sections, and painted with large, energetic strokes in myriad vivid and impactful colors. Hence Fuller’s exhibit title, New Coordinates, succinctly depicts the major shifts exemplified in his life and work.
Randal Fyfe Leigh also shows his unique Parietal Art and Petroglyph Suite in the Franklin Street hallway. Through this suite of large scale sculpture, the artist shares his admiration for “the interaction of nature’s geologic artistry and man’s earliest connection with his own imagination and creative impulse.”
Leigh’s chosen title of parietal art broadly refers to cave paintings, drawings and carvings on the interior of caves. His shows representations of these ancient art forms with his works Bovem de Antiquis de Villefranche and Sky Beings and other works. He depicts a petroglyph in his Pacific Current. All may also appear at www.asitisabove.
The artist laboriously constructed these realistic sculptures of hardened 3D foam core, carved to resemble weathered rock faces, painted to depict both hues of the rock and ancient artwork. His honed his innate artistic ability with some 40 years of work in Los Angeles.
In L.A., he created backdrops, sets and props for live audiences and film productions Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the Jay Leno Tonight Show and many others, winning two Emmy Awards in the process (for more info see David Jasper’s June 14 interview in the Bulletin’s GO! or the Cascade A&E June issue).
Now residing near Bend, Leigh speaks of his admiration of the vistas of Central Oregon or Monument Valley where one experiences great vastness, yet an intimacy. He notes, “Especially, when in that vastness, you discover small but mysteriously elegant testimony to beginnings of that same appreciation etched in or stained on stone, outlasting its creators but resonating through time.” Herein he describes humanity’s fascination, through time, with the geologic and animal world of which we are a part.