Photographs of India and Nepal
Mary Pat Waldron
at Apple Annie’s Gourmet Cafe
Showing through October
There’s nothing like a downtown high-rise bank building to suck the soul from
an art hanging. It’s that same sterile, stultifying professional property
management aura that somehow renders food from the eateries in those buildings
utterly tasteless.
Fortunately, Apple Annie’s, located in the subterranean courtyard level of
Bank One’s headquarters, delightfully defies all those dreaded norms. An oasis
of inner urban sanity, the place is filled with real food, real people, and
great walls for hanging and viewing artwork.
On the day I went to see Mary Pat Waldron’s photographic exhibit, Apple
Annie’s was cranked up a notch with anticipation of the noon verdict on the
O.J. Simpson trial.
As if in direct contrast to the theatric travesty our judicial system had
played out over the electronic media for months on end, Waldron’s photographic
prints depict a different life, a different set of values she’d come to know
during a year-and-a-half of travel through Southeast Asia. Her works lovingly
reveal a simpler, older, more spiritually connected people and place.
“Spending that much time in any environment draws you into its own rhythm,”
she says, “I found an acceptance, where my persona no longer intruded on my
surroundings. I felt I became invisible.” Waldron was able to take in her
surroundings with a patience few visitors can afford, capturing everyday scenes
in black-and-white and color images with uncommon intimacy.
Her color prints reveal a magic and mystery in her subject places and people.
In a stunning print of early-morning mist over Nagin Lake, looking out on the
cityscape of Kashmir, India, a vendor with his young son begins his daily
journey, poling a small wooden boat loaded with the brilliantly colored flowers
that illuminate an otherwise monochromatic scene of gray. A cityscape in
Varanasi shows Hindu holy men before a bright green wall, murals and octagonal
turrets in the early-morning misty light that softens the picture with a
mysterious, dreamlike, painterly quality.
Waldron, originally a University of Texas Journalism major, says this journey
and the resulting body of work prompted her decision to pursue photography as a
career and art form.
The Theater Cat and Other Recent Work
Phillip E. Wade
The Gallery at Concordia
Showing through October
In contrast to Waldron’s foreign world documentation, Austin painter Phillip
E. Wade’s The Theater Cat and Other Recent Works, offers an escape into
comfortingly familiar places. His places are filled with enchanting gardens,
cats, bright-eyed innocent young men, and women in flowing dresses.
Wade is undoubtedly one of Austin’s most accomplished painters. A native of
England, trained at Pennsylvania’s Academy of Fine Arts and UT’s MFA program,
he adopts a bold brush stroke that gives his figures the full,
three-dimensional realist look of early impressionism — before the likes of
Van Gogh and Monet obliterated all attempts at realism in their images. To
explain the non-reality of subjects and settings, Wade uses theatrical
trappings — masks, model stages, ballet sketches and poses.
“Southard Home” harkens back to a romantic, genteel era. A mother and child in
turn-of-the-century garb stroll along a lake, the front end and hood ornament
of a classic Rolls Royce jutting into the background. Theatrical stage curtains
frame the entire scene to let you know it’s all just make-believe.
In “The Joy of Cleaning,” a woman, clad in floral pastel house dress, leg
raised in perfect balletic arabesque, smiles ecstatically while thumping an
oriental rug with a beater she wields like a fairy’s magic wand. Background
brush strokes in colors echoing the dress define a dazzling circular motion
that makes the entire canvas dance.
Wade’s aims are modest, and they hit their mark. He offers a refuge from the
ugly, demanding everyday, to a beauty that may exist only in our clouded
memories — or in our Hollywood-addled imaginations. —
Cory Walton
This article appears in October 27 • 1995 and October 27 • 1995 (Cover).