Page 16 - the NOISE March 2013

16 • MARCH 2013 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us
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Jack Rabbit by Raina Gentry is among the artist’s series, “It’s In My Nature” at West of the Moon.
graph. “I hiked up to the arch where hundreds of people were photographing it. I waited until they all left and spent about three hours taking this picture during the night. I wanted to create a star trail photo with a well-known geographical structure in the image.”
Mr. Cornett tells me about his experience teaching photography this year so far, “It’s a really cool thing to share my knowledge of photography with young people. I have a lot of curious students who have endless talent and potential and some who produce pho- tography on a college level.”
Ellora Boudreaux, another of Mr. Cor- nett’s students tells me what she has learned so far this year in photography: “You’re cap- turing a moment that allows others to not only see what you’ve made, but to see the world through your eyes and experience the moment just as you have,” she says.
I ask Ms. Bourdreaux if there is a message she hopes people get from viewing her pho- tograph. “I hope people learn to see what’s around them in a new perspective, to look more at the little details that make up what you’re seeing.”
In a clever image, Kailtlin Garcia photo- graphed two crab apples spotted through a hole in a picnic table. “I was inspired to take this photo because we had just learned about the frame within a frame technique,” she says. When I saw the light hitting the apples, I knew I had to capture it. Also, the colors complement each other well and that really caught my eye.”
It’s inspiring to see students interested in their art, and the Youth Art exhibit showcas- es an array of Flagstaff’s future generation of artists. The Youth Exhibit will remain on dis- play through April 6. CulturalPartners.org
IN MY NATURE
“As with much of my work, the theme is na-
ture,”West of the Moon featured artist Raina Gentry tells me.
What first drew me to Ms. Gentry’s work was her use of detail, often hiding images within the painting; figures worked in out of the way, things you may never even notice, if you didn’t take the time to look.
I ask her about the name of this body of work, called, “It’s in my Nature.” Ms. Gentry explains to me, “I picked this title as sort of a play on words, to say that not only is the show about nature, but also about how it is in my nature to paint in a certain way,” she says.
“The artist tells me about how this recent collection of paintings ties together, “The pieces sort of evolve, one after another, each one informing the next,” she says. “I started this body of work with the piece, Symphony in the Desert. This painting happened very spontaneously, and I was very pleased with the results and wanted to create more like it with the desert theme, but I have little con- trol over this stuff, and so all the subsequent paintings in the body are quite different ex- cept that I do use similar techniques in all of them.
“The next painting was the very large, for me, painting called The Duel, which is 40 x 60 inches, one of the largest paintings I’ve ever completed. I don’t usually paint on this scale, as it is very challenging to do the kind of de- tail I do over such a large expanse. This paint- ing was really a labor of love, I don’t know how else to explain it. It took everything I had to bring it to life, and to make it ready for this show.”
“The works that came next all have a very similar style and theme,” Ms. Gentry con- tinues. “I got on a role with the next few paintings, and wanted to really see what I could do with this very simple composition. Color is the driving factor in all of these, and they harken back to my boulder series. Also,