Now David was small but oh my… The choice of the title Slingshot for the recent group exhibition (901 W. San Mateo) symbolized the daunting task of several Northern New Mexico artists taking aim at the Goliath of Santa Fe’s art market. The results were impressive. The highly professional show comprised over 60 abstract oils and monoprints by seven artists from Taos and Santa Fe.

Kristine Keheley achieves large effects on a small surface. In A Calm Stretch (oil on masonite), atmosphere and dense tonalities combine without loss of chromatic subtlety or structure. In Faith (oil and ink on paper) fluid ink brush strokes hang like a sword in a spatial maze, its surface laced with threadlike script alluding to Ariadne’s patient conquest of her own labyrinth.

Michael Schroeder creates monoprints of abstract harmonies in earth colors, reworking the composition with collage and graphic elements. Her Fires is a grid of uniform squares of red, yellow, and green anchored by gray. In Beneath Your Flower, gray is deployed in chiasmic pattern with red and green. Each monotype bears the marks of a strong personal style and narrative impulse. In Ria Burnett’s Orchard (mixed media with emulsion transfer) two rows variously project images attached to deep frames or objects encased within them. The artist’s interplay of pictorial form with tangible matter create a pensive sense of close observation and personal memory. Burnett uses similar framing of pastel and emulsion image in Split in Twos, combining abstract analysis and landscape association.

R. Angele Mason uses the media of graphite and pastel to produce small, engaging studies of sculptural shapes with the enigmatic title, Men Without Balls Live in Small Houses. These tools are turned with good effect to the larger format of Darkness Has a Hunger, a composition of plastic shapes on a chalky matte surface; the structure relies upon the configuration of forms on the neutral ground.

Suzanne Wiggin works in oils on wood, canvas, and linen. Bluish Day (oil on wood) demonstrates her sure brush technique and strong command of natural palette, while Late Daylight (oil on wood) shows her acute observation of nature. In Small Pond the painter shifts her approach to a more analytic, planar treatment of natural form through a highly expressive balance of horizontal bands of intense, bright hues.

Wendy Orville creates an abstract play of primaries in concert with landscape subject in a series of three monoprints. In Motionless Sun, landscape serves as loose structure to anchor the expressive color areas. In Late Moon (monoprint) Orville achieves monumental effects in her handling of a nearly monochromatic expanse of dark blue color field.

In his oils on paper transferred to canvas (Untitled, 33-38), Randall La Gro imbues high-key abstraction with narrative relief. His assertive brushwork and vigorous hatching of the surface never intrudes on the illusive power of his colors. The compositions maintain this aerial/tactile ambiguity even where he moves to more expressive range and more palpable handling. La Gro exploits the pictorial capacity to evoke plastic form and expansive space.

The collaborative monoprints, Slingshot I and 11, reflect a quality projected by all the artists in the exhibition. Beyond the group’s mastery of monoprint and accomplished, personal control of color and line, each artist conveyed a deep sensitivity to their high-desert milieu, however abstract a direction the artist pursued in his or her own work. That response to place explains in part the success and broad appeal of this exhibition.

The Taos News, July 20,1995 B4

What do six Taos artists and one from Santa Fe have in common? More than you’d think.

Strength is in numbers, according to a group of Taos artists (and one from Santa Fe) who call themselves “Slingshot.”

The newly formed alliance — consisting of Wendy Orville, Kristine Keheley, R. Angele Mason, Suzanne Wiggin, Randall LaGro, Ria Burnett and Michael Schroeder — are planning a debut exhibition that opens with a reception from 4-7 p.m. Saturday (July 22) in a space they’ve rented at 901 West San Mateo in Santa Fe.

Although the group is planning to burst onto the scene in another town, members said they also plan to give Taos audiences a chance to see what they’ve been up to in a show here sometime in the near future. The reason they chose to have it in Santa Fe, Keheley said, is because they wanted to capitalize on concurrent exhibits associated with Site Santa Fe and Art Santa Fe.

The name of the group came to Keheley because it seemed to capture “surprise, playful energy and it should come at you like a slingshot.”

Mason said the group is made up of artists who are all “fairly young and with not a lot of exposure.” Young artists in Taos have had a difficult time becoming known, especially when so many gallery owners like to play it safe and fall back on the old reliables. Banding together, she said, makes sense in that people are more likely to notice them than if they saw their work individually.

But more than that, she said, it is a chance to play off one another in a group situation, where each can “brainstorm” and contribute to individual and group ideas.

“It’s a good support system,” Keheley said. “We’re hoping for reaction or interaction and to create a dialogue,” like that generated around the great art groups of the past. “This is one response to show what young artists are doing who are passionate about their work.”

The group plans to show paintings, monoprints and photography in the exhibit.

Schroeder, the only Santa Fe artist in the group, said, “Conveyed through the language of scream and whisper,’ my art exists as reality, memory and what I see when I open my eyes.”

Orville said, “My work is a balance between what I see and what I sense. It is about an essence of place.”

And LaGro said, “Painting affords a language transcending words — from casual conversations to communications one can’t explain.”

By Tom Collins, The Magazine, July 1992

With each successive exhibition, the Barber Shop Gallery in Rancho de Taos gently but insidiously undermines the tourist-targeted, postcard-aesthetic zeitgeist that pervades this fawning “art colony.” The work presented by director/owner Wes Mills (himself a fine artist) in this tiny dissolving adobe, located just north of the, tchotchka shops sacrilegiously hugging the buttresses of San Francisco de Assis Church, restates the obvious: you don’t need track lighting or three-color invitations to search out and present gratifying artistic efforts.

This time it’s the gritty, raku ceramics of Marc Baseman, and the monoprint landscapes of Wendy Orville, two of the new wave of refreshing young artists ( neither is over thirty) who have arrived in Taos in the past several years. Baseman divides his time almost equally between painting and drawing and work in clay, and has several ceramic temple box constructions in this show. His small “temples” refer directly to Oriental models as they achieve a monumental aspect. The primitive, yet oddly ornate architectural works can be taken apart to reveal boxes-within boxes and the vessel-like nature of the objects.

While ostensibly non-objective, Orville’s monoprints are landscapes inspired by the natural world. The thirteen prints have an aqueous, airy tone in pleasing contrast to the stark, arid vistas of the Southwest. The quick, loose energy of the monoprint process is present, but so is a natural, unassuming placidity.

Each artist has presented separate pleasures, but the combination of contrasting elements—earth and fire, air and water—is particularly apposite and again make for a show whose achievement far outreaches its humble intention and presentation.

By Maxine Olderman. a freelance writer and art critic for the Register, has a degree in art history from Connecticut College.

From the shores of Caumsett Long Island and the fjords of Eduard Munch’s Norway comes the inspiration for Wendy Orville’s paintings and drawings.

A collection of her works, now at the Small Space gallery, titled “Intimate Spaces: Landscapes” underscores her belief, contained in an artists’ statement accompanying the exhibition. that “immense spaces exist in miniature and trees seem to have spirits of their own.”

The Long Island shore provided the scenic inspiration for these landscapes painted on site, but the song of Norway comes by way of her Norwegian mother and frequent visits there. She has found inspiration from an Icelandic painter named Louisa Mattisdottir, but finds herself drawn to Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse as well.

Orville’s work does often re-mind the viewer of Matisse’s playful, dancing forms and although she concentrates on exterior landscapes in this exhibit, there is the jewel-like intimacy of Bonnard’s interiors.

Other allusions come to mind, particularly when she is working in watercolor, of Chinese brush work and Japanese scrolls. When she translates her visions in oil her work evokes the spirit of Raoul Duty’s luxuriant paintings of the Cote D’Azur. There is also an un-mistakably French plein-air feeling in her small work “Mist” that captures a palpable moistness in the atmosphere and a vivid sense of impressionistic light.

A mythology of the natural world seems to envelop these paintings and drawings as if the objects Orville has chosen to depict are emblematic of the secrets beneath the surface.

Orville has a clear mission when interpreting these outdoor scenes.

“I want people to recognize where these places are and see that it is clearly a tree and clearly a landscape,” I she said in a recent interview. “But all the while I want them to have an emotional connection. I try to still things down to their basic few shapes and colors that convey what I was looking for.

I work to get rid of extra detail.”

No work illustrates this principle of reducing a landscape to its most elemental features than “Tree Spirits I” a haunting talisman of design and color. The passing of a red sailboat becomes a well-placed dot of red on the horizon: a pool of cerulean blue defines the water. Tropical grass and exotic tree forms impart a sense of magic — as if wood nymphs might dart between the trees at any moment.

“Pond,” another oil on paper is a simpler, smaller rendering of rough paint strokes that give it a full, rich texture.

“Single Tree” reduces the subject matter to a solitary object. A lone tree is enmeshed in a hill built of blue, green and lavender. A blue sky framed in pink frames the picture. As in many of Orville’s smaller pieces, this concentration on a single tree allows her to explore its particular depth and de-tail. When working on a larger can-vas, some of this richness is often lost.

A trio of paintings. “Pond and Sea.” “Path” and “Two Clouds” have amorphous, muddy tendencies. “Path” is easily the most successful of the three. . There is much to see that is satisfying in this interpretation of a path, sky, trees and grass where detail is conveyed with a minimum of excess brushstrokes.

“How I feel when I come to look at a particular vista will determine how it looks to me,” she said. “I want to be very direct but I find that the place itself can inspire certain moods that go beyond the obvious.”

“Tree Spirits III” is just such a mood piece. A mirror image in watercolor of an oil that depicts the same scene, this is a lovely blend of color, feeling and design. It has the soft look of a pastel and paint drips down the canvas like colored rain. Flora and fauna have a distinctly Japanese texture in this especially poetic painting.

As an art teacher at The Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School in New Haven,. Orville has the opportunity to experience children using their natural freedom of expression when interpreting nature. Never troubled by painting the sky green, or the water red, Orville has discovered that this spiritual openness has affected her work.

“Children are so nonacademic and so spontaneous with color,” she said. “They believe in the magic of their work. They don’t distinguish between what’s real and not real. For them, art is about anything you want it to be.”

For Orville, a child’s eye view of the natural world has produced a very mature body of work that echoes Pablo Picasso’s theory that it takes a very long time to become young.