Art: New Work by Mary Warner

Talent in bloom

By Erika Yowell

Las Vegas artist Mary Warner is the kind of painter who could tackle any subject she wanted with spectacular results. Seriously. She's the rare draftswoman who simply has a facility with her medium that few contemporary painters can or even try to achieve. I absolutely covet her painting of a street in my neighborhood that hangs--or hung (I've not been there in a while)--in the director's office at the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV. It succeeds in being gritty and sublimely beautiful at the same time, and is virtually photorealistic in the quality of its rendering. With Bob Stupak's kitsch palace Vegas World looming in the distance beneath a rapturous, only-in-Vegas sunset (who says God has forsaken Sin City?), Warner has captured Las Vegas' dichotomy perfectly.

With strikingly little variation, Warner has selected flowers as her subject matter for the last several years. These are in no way the yonic icons of Georgia O'Keeffe, however. Warner's flower paintings on convex panels swathed in black velvet are a familiar mainstay of her oeuvre. A typical piece in this vein features a single bloom with densely packed, tentacle-like petals that curl sensually inward even as they explode toward the edges of the panel like phallic firecrackers.

In New Work, her current show at the Winchester Center Gallery through July 23, Warner is clearly experimenting with color as well as abstraction while sticking to the floral motif. In "Curl," she presents one of her signature flowers (spider mum, maybe?) in shimmery chartreuse; the black velvet substrate offsets this vibrant hue brilliantly. "Blue Growing" features another vibrantly colored flower on black velvet; this time, though, the flower petals appear to be bloating into anemone-style fingers, translucent and cerulean, giving the painting a decidedly underwater feel.

Warner envisions these pregnant versions of her flowers as vaguely aquatic, too, if the titles of several of the charcoal and pastel studies are any indication. "Bubble Flowers, Study" presents three incarnations of the morphed spider mums in white, plum and pale green against a maize background.

Also on display are several studies that allow the viewer to see Warner's design process in progress. "Flora Study, Rose, Blue" shows evidence of the artist working out the intricacies of rendering volume and dynamism in her abstracted blooms. Still compelling in its unfinished state, this sort of image mediates between artist and viewer, offering an illuminating look at the labor that goes into the breathtaking end product.