A show of newly developed work by Michael D. Marshall opening in St. Louis is akin to a homecoming gig by the homegrown composer and musician Oliver Lake or a performance by native son poet Quincy Troupe. Like those better-known brothers in their more popular art forms, Marshall is one of the finest visual artists from St. Louis to emerge in his generation.
And also like Lake and Troupe, Marshall aims to please. Lake’s bands swing; Troupe’s poetry is accessible to anyone who understands the English language. Just because they are geniuses, they don’t act like they need to show how much smarter than you they are. Actually, they want to delight and inspire us. Marshall shows the same humble and winning approach in his visual art.
He knows very well what he is doing. “When the prints are working well, I am absorbed into a soothing and well-ordered visual dimension,” Marshall writes in the Artist’s Statement to his new show of mono prints. His choice of language reflects very accurately the new work he has to show his hometown: it is “soothing” and “well-ordered” in the “visual dimension” in which he works so well.
The public should come and get absorbed in this pleasing visual dimension at Atrium Gallery this Friday, September 16. The opening of New Studio Works: Michael Marshall Mono Prints + John Schwartzkopf Sculptures will be celebrated with the artists from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery, located at 4728 McPherson Ave. in the Central West End. To hear personally more of Marshall’s precise use of language, come back to the gallery at 11 a.m. Saturday, September 17 to hear him speak about the work.
Marshall – who is well known in contemporary art circles throughout the world as a painter – has been working using complex procedures with oil-based media and overlapping stencils. He was influenced in developing these new procedures by the sculptor Albert Paley’s use of stencils during his residency at the University of Hawaii Hilo, where Marshall is a professor and administrator in the Art Department.
I also see traces of Henri Matisse’s effortlessly graceful late-period cut-outs, executed when the master was wheelchair-bound. The graceful forms and brilliant colors of late Matisse are overlaid on figural patterns that evoke at times African masks, and at times the human dramas of Jacob Lawrence. Other marks seem to indicate the spirit of play and the joy of geometry – what Marshall himself calls “calligraphic doodles.” But even these colorful scribbles appear against a backdrop of form and color shaped by a master. As Marshall writes, “I usually start with two or three large shapes and solid ground coloration and work to place the forms in a manner that will maximize visual tensions.”
New Studio Works: Michael Marshall Mono Prints + John Schwartzkopf Sculptures opens 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, September 16 at the Atrium Gallery, 4728 McPherson Ave. Marshall speaks there 11 a.m. Saturday, September 17. Call 314-3671076 or visit www.atriumgallery.net.
