Some artists — maybe all of them — revisit the history of painting like composer/musicians improvising original works based on familiar themes. For seven decades, Cleveland’s Joseph O’Sickey has played the French modernist scale of colors and values — ranging from Bonnard’s fleshy subtleties to the inventions of Matisse — with incomparable aplomb.
Though long well-known to Cleveland’s relatively small arts
audience, O’Sickey became more widely admired following his first solo
show, at the Akron Museum in 1962. That same year, he earned the
Cleveland Museum of Art’s Best Painting award in its annual May Show
— though his first May Show inclusion was in 1938, and he was to
win Best Painting three more times in 1964, 1965 and 1967. After
winning the prize the first time, he signed a contract with Seligmann
Galleries in New York.
In fact, O’Sickey has been one of Cleveland’s best-known
contemporary painters, educators and designers for more than 40 years,
showing frequently in New York and even more often around Northeast
Ohio. Most of that time, Cleveland Heights’ venerable Vixseboxie
Gallery has represented his work. In the Light at Bonfoey
Gallery is his first exhibit at the area’s other longest-running
commercial gallery.
With paintings, watercolors and drawings upstairs and downstairs,
there’s a lot to see. No one could ask for a more appropriate and
welcoming garden of images to visit on an autumn day. Though O’Sickey
has worked in a number of different manners, his dominant mode owes
much to the visual fragmentation often associated with
post-impressionism — Vuillard’s obsessive patterning, Bonnard’s
atmospheric shifts and changes in perspective, and the syncopated
integration of figure and ground typical of Matisse, a dance resembling
the constant movement of light and shade on a wind-stirred autumn day.
Many of O’Sickey’s works, especially the larger ones, are as richly
colored and complex as a Middle-eastern textile. They offer a
magic-carpet trip through his own back yard near Kent, transfigured by
a lifetime spent in the contemplation of line, color and
composition.
Though gardens and flowers have pride of place, the unusual
selection of works gleaned from a bewildering wealth of canvases and
works on paper stored in his studio include many other subjects and
several quite different styles. At 91, O’Sickey continues to paint five
hours a day. Zoos and circuses, as well as the fauna of our own woods
and fields, have often inspired the painter. They also remind us that
O’Sickey, born in 1918, was first educated by the earlier generation of
the Cleveland School.
Painters like Paul Travis, Viktor Schreckengost, Carl Gaertner,
William Somers and their sometime associate Charles Burchfield all have
left recognizable marks on O’Sickey’s choices. There are tigers in
this world, and horses and elephants and many birds — especially
owls. Decide for yourself whether O’Sickey’s “Snow Owls” in a small ink
study are more imbued with life’s mysteries than the giant eyes of
flowers in the oil-on-canvas “Vases of Sunflowers.” Both are haunting.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2009.