 "Photo: Neka Jones/Echo Staff Photographer")
One can adore pop art, but "Color Balance: Paintings by Felrath Hines" will take you on a fantastic voyage that will teach a whole new understanding of bubbly colors and odd shapes.
This past Sunday, a new exhibition has come to N.C. Central University's Art Museum featuring the perfect example of various hues placed on equilibrium. The vibrant thing has touched down and has been pleasing to the eye.
In early 2009, Hines' widow Dorothy Fisher donated a selection of his major works to the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and the NCCU Art Museum. All three institutions have expressed interest in Hines' work in the past.
The exhibition presented a vivid connection between the art and the creator itself. In this case, it was translated through blots of paint and nonfigurative shapes.
Intangible eye candy, Hines' work is singular, but displays analogous emotions at the same time.
Hines, who was one of the chief colorists, was early influenced by Cubism, playing with various tones of color and turning them into hefty geometric concepts.
Much of the detail in Hines' work involves smooth, milky textures, which are sharply supported by defined lines.
The works included in "Color Balance" features fourteen of Hines' major paintings and four drawings that range from the 1960s to his death in 1993.
Pieces in the exhibition include "Kellylike." It's a homage to American hard-edge and color field painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly's shaped canvases. Also included is "Aquatic Adventures," the last piece completed before Hines' death, and "Japanese Landscape," which is an important early effort that tested the interplay of delicate shades of gray.
As one can only imagine, each piece truly illustrates a distinctive story and since all of the work is abstract, anyone can make their own interpretation.
Carlitta Durand, a local up-and-coming R&B singer/songwriter and recent alumna, shared her appreciation for one of Hines' pieces, "Escape."
She explained that the oil on linen piece looks like a colorful window, open for the perfect get-a-way. She also described the three-dimensional white element resembling a paper plane, possibly "escaping" out of the three-toned window.
Another winner is "Yellow on Yellow," which won interest for the sun blinding, incorporated hue.
Hines uses layers with magnitude– showing us definitions of color balance.
What's your interpretation? "Color Balance" is open for viewing through December 10.
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