Watercolorists display their sense of humor.
By: Josh Appelbaum
Visitors stepping into the Gourgaud Gallery this month can be assured that their eyes aren’t playing tricks on them it’s the artists who are fooling around.
This month the Gourgaud Gallery will host "April Foolery," an exhibit featuring 20 members of Watercolorists Unlimited, a Princeton-area painting critique circle that focuses on a new subject every month.
Lisa Walsh, a Cranbury resident and the exhibition’s organizer, said the paintings displayed in the gallery incorporate trickery, or trompe l’oeil, French for, "to fool the eye," by employing surrealism, exaggeration, puns or jokes.
Ms. Walsh’s painting "Sold!" is surrealist composition, with a landscape scene obstructed by a folded check for $1,000, presumably a fair price for one of her works. The painting was based on a photograph she’d taken on Block Island, N.Y., and was intended as a landscape piece until she got an idea for the "April Foolery" show.
"The check started out to be a bit bigger," Ms. Walsh said. "My husband said ‘why would you want to ruin a perfectly good painting by putting money in it.’ "
Ms. Walsh said she wanted to contextualize different realistic objects to create a surreal image, but she was overwhelmed with the love of the landscape.
"I tried to pushed the check out of the way," Ms. Walsh said.
Other pieces have titles and subjects that form puns double entendres, such as "Tiger Woods," by Livy Glaubitz, which depicts an imaginary wood with camouflaged tigers in the foreground and a barely discernable golf green in the background.
"It’s a joke a puzzle," Ms. Glaubitz said. "My husband and I were discussing puns over dinner and it just came to me."
"Egg Hunt Snowball Fight, Weather Permitting," a painting by Beverly Nickel, was taken from a photograph of her grandchildren playing on the beach.
Ms. Nickel added some children to the image, some of whom are rolling colored eggs while others are tossing snowballs. The blue background hearkens to a beach and the sea.
"I took some pictures of my grandchildren and painted them," Ms. Nickel said. "And I was thinking about this time of year and how there was only one Easter in (recent memory) that it didn’t snow."
Mikkey Tarantino’s "Bisque Boscs" is more subtle in its trickery and uses light and composition to contrast a copper bowl of porcelain Bosc pears and a bunch of red grapes with a blank background.
"I first set it up as a still life painting," Ms. Tarantino said. "The copper bowl brought some intense shadows and changes in color. I use a layering technique for the shadows that contrasts the light and dark."
Each month Watercolorists Unlimited meets at members’ homes to critique artwork on seasonal and stylistic subjects. The group is exhibiting select works at the Blackwells Mills Canal House in Somerset on April 23 and 24.
Today (Friday) the Arts Review Committee will host a First Friday Reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Gourgaud Gallery. The show will run until April 29. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

