Exhibitionism

PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS BY PHILIP TRUSSELL: A 25-YEAR-OLD GUITARIST AT A FRIDAY NIGHT GIG

Alternate Current Art Space,
through July 4

Oftentimes a restaurant or club will book a band month after month because of the consistent, top-notch music the musicians keep cranking out. For a band, such a gig means that it has achieved a solid repertoire of songs that the audience can look forward to seeing time and again. Live music, after all, has to be fresh and invigorating for each show in order to keep the fans absorbed.

If there is anything like a house band in the visual arts community in Austin, Philip Trussell is just that. Each spring for the last six years, the New England native has produced an exhibition of new paintings and drawings at Alternate Current Art Space, with each of these shows unusual and refreshingly vibrant and no two exactly the same. This year, once again, Trussell delivers a new symphony of canvases and again we cannot help but hear the music in his brushstrokes.

Trussell, who is in his 50s, evokes as much energy and youth in his artwork as a 25-year-old guitarist at a Friday night gig. The sheer volume of material and mind-boggling quality he manages to produce every year are those of an artist half his age. This year's show includes more than 50 new canvases, most of which have been painted since January. The artist chooses not to title any of his works, content instead to group enough paintings in one area to create a theme (I counted four), leaving titles to the imagination of the audience. In a handwritten note to the viewers, Trussell hints at his technique: "What matters is the space and time yielded by the study. The paintings are instruments to be played."

For all his lively output, Trussell remains exact and adept at his craft. The artist has a studied and detailed eye for nudes, a common subject in his paintings. In one of the artist's thematic groups, male and female figures populate baroque-style landscapes and mythic scenarios that at times bridge those ancient worlds to futuristic, post-apocalyptic cityscapes. One canvas has a male nude crawling through windows, depicted as light blue and white shades of color, as if he were being born through time, emerging into a concrete world of dark blues, blacks, and yellows.

Not surprisingly, most of Trussell's paintings seem busy and alive, an influence that may be linked to the early 20th-century Futurists, in particular Marcel Duchamp and his famous work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. In that painting, as in Trussell's, there appear to be overlapping views of the same figure, as if the artist were painting under a strobe light. There is a rearing horse or a country landscape painted all in purple, as well as larger nude studies in which the figures seem to have four arms or five faces. Trussell seems to have captured a myriad of poses of one model on a single canvas. The colors are vibrant and lively yet brooding, as if some imminent downfall were lurking around the corner.

In a striking tangent to the other subjects, Trussell's current show includes a group of urban landscapes depicting mysterious nighttime street scenes where parked cars and distant lights depict lonely city images. The architecture in these pieces is from an older part of the country, and we get the feeling that we're standing out in the cold of some cozy community of which we're not a part. The mood is sad but peaceful in these pieces, and the colors are dark with the exception of the yellow lights casting warm shadows on the cold concrete streets busied by anonymous cars. If this is indicative of where Trussell is headed with his painting for next year's show, then we can, yet again, look forward to some great music. — Sam Martin

THE MIKADO: A BUFFOON BEHIND EVERY FAN

Helm Fine Arts Center,
St. Stephen's School
through June 21
Running time: 2 hrs, 50 min

In life, self-absorbed people are an insufferable drag. You can't have a simple conversationwith them without having it shanghaied into an in-depth discussion of their favorite subject: themselves — a subject upon which they will expound at length. Try to introduce another topic and it will be greeted with either wearied disinterest or outright disdain. And the worst of them, the ones who are not just self-absorbed but self-important, to boot, will look at you as if they're peering through a microscope at some particularly primitive protozoan.

In art, on the other hand, these nattering nabobs of narcissism can be incomparably delightful. Put under a microscope themselves, where their irritating habits may be studied from a distance rather than endured painfully at close range, these egotists come off as comic, their vanity and swellheadedness so extreme as to be laughable. They're buffoons, and rendered with the right dash of ridicule, they can be pure pleasure.

In the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Austin's current revival of The Mikado — a show which boasts a self-absorbed buffoon behind every fan — that right dash of ridicule is present. Make that omnipresent. Guest director Ralph MacPhail Jr. and a merry cast tackle the puffed-up citizens of the Japanese town of Titipu with all the mockery they can muster, and the result is a gallery of egotists whose excesses amuse. In the role of Yum-Yum, the young beauty who loves Nanki-Poo but must wed her guardian Ko-Ko, Amy Baker Stinson makes immodesty a virtue; she proclaims her own attractiveness with such blithe matter-of-factness that it charms. Playing her partner in romance, Nanki-Poo, Dan Giradot radiates a like lightheartedness, but with his own touch of lightheadedness, too; he has the eager, guileless, and rather dim air of one of those "golly-gee-whiz" ingenues of old Hollywood — a Dennis Day, and with Day's arcing, achingly tender Irish tenor, too. Then there's Ko-Ko, a Lord High Executioner by default who must find a neck to cleave posthaste lest he find himself under the business end of his tradesman's blade. Ezra Johnson fills the role with outsized anxiety and silly shtick; he's a Nervous Nellie who's always sure he's about to be caught for something... anything. And there's Katisha, the forceful spinster who has already laid claim to Nanki-Poo and aims to have him, no matter what; Janette Jones gives us all the character's bulldog determination, with a glare that would set fire to the Sea of Japan and a mean sweep of her kimono train that would strike fear in the fiercest samurai. And, of course, there's the Mikado himself, played with comical serenity by the ebulliently expressive Russell Gregory; outfitted with a cap topped with two curling antennae, Gregory appears to be the Eastern cousin to Lewis Carroll's Caterpillar from Wonderland. And out-sneering them all is Brett Barnes' Pooh-Bah, he who holds almost every office of import in Titipu; as this bluest of blue bloods, who can trace his ancestry back to the primordial soup, Barnes keeps his nose as high as a turtle's, with a perpetually sour expression suggesting the scent of rotten eggs on the wind. Every scene is marked by some amusing expression of conceit from one of the above: a complacent smile at one's own virtues, a vinegary smirk at another's lack of same, a whimper, a snort, the crisp crack of an opening fan (this last used to great effect many times over).

Of course, the pleasures of this production extend further than a proficiency in portraying self-admiring fools. The music itself is never less than pleasing, and sometimes borders on the exquisite, as when Stinson's Yum-Yum compares herself to the heavenly bodies and the actress' voice soars skyward, full and bright like a comet in reverse. Musical director Jeffrey Jones Ragona brings a lively leadership to the relatively small orchestra, helping them make up in spirit what they lack in number, and he shapes many of the choral numbers — such as the delicious madrigal — into buoyant intertwinings of voices that give you a fresh appreciation of Sir Arthur Sullivan's talents as a composer. There are pleasures, also, in the production's look, with Richard Brown's sets evoking Japan with a few simple elements, artfully presented: a temple gate of burnished cherry wood; ink prints of cranes; a toy-like miniature footbridge; a sweeping mural of a mountain; limbs sprouting cherry blossoms.

But while the production elements may be satisfying, they could not save the show if it were lacking the spirit that drive the work of Gilbert & Sullivan. A G&S operetta lives and dies by its sense of fun, as not a few past productions by this company have shown. Frequently, the Austin society has attempted productions only to have some mixture of unfortunate circumstances — inexperience in the cast, overly ambitious production elements, creative differences among company members, whatever — lead to leaden products. This time around, however, the result is one to celebrate. Director MacPhail is regarded as a specialist in the traditions of the D'Oyly Carte, the company that originally performed the works of Gilbert & Sullivan. I'm no G&S scholar and so can't testify to the historical accuracy of his staging, but I can say it was fun. MacPhail infused the production with a playfulness that allowed both the beauty of Sullivan's score and the satire of Gilbert's text to bubble forth, like a fresh spring. — Robert Faires