Morgan Craig at the Parkland Art Gallery

Corner of the Morgan Craig exhibit at the Parkland Art Gallery

Jackie and I were over by Parkland College to do the final harvest at our garden plot, and took the opportunity to visit the Parkland Art Gallery, where the current exhibit is a set of large oil paintings by Morgan Craig.

I’ve been meaning to mention Parkland’s art gallery for a long time. It’s an excellent small gallery that shows a wide range of art. Students, faculty, local artists, and internationally known artists are all featured. It is one place that, despite our straitened  condition, we donate to. That’s not only because we want to support this great resource for the community, but also because they respect and appreciate even their small donors. Our $50 donation to the Parkland Art Gallery makes us patrons. A $50 donation to the Krannert Art Musuem doesn’t even make you a friend (maybe a passing acquaintance).

Sorry for the crappy camera phone image of the art, it really doesn’t do it justice—check out the exhibit link above or Morgan Craig’s artist site to get a better idea of the art, which shows great mastery of line, mass, and perspective. (The leftmost picture in my image, for example, is foolish thing desire.)

I wanted to put the picture up, though, to talk about the color pallet. Most of these pictures are rich in teal and orange. It’s a striking paring. (For one thing, the colors are complementary—that is, opposite one another on the color wheel—so they pop when viewed together.) These pictures of urban decay use them well: the teal for unrusted metal and the orange for the rust, the orange for daylight and the teal for shadows. But a little goes a long way, and as you can see from my crappy little picture, this exhibit was really heavy on the teal-and-orange, something that I’ve been perhaps over-sensitive to since reading the article Teal and Orange – Hollywood, Please Stop the Madness. (Don’t click through to that post unless you want to be similarly sensitized.)

Anyway, given my own interest in the theme of urban decay, I found this a great little exhibit. If you’re local, you should definitely check it out. Visiting it has reminded us that we really ought to go see every exhibit at the Parkland Art Gallery. It’s so close, and the exhibits are so often excellent, that it would definitely reward the minor effort involved.