Aiming for Mood

Colleen McGuire is a long, tall drink of water, cool and dressed in black at the opening of her one-woman show at Sharon’s Hotchkiss Library last Sunday. She is elegant and angular, as are her architectural paintings, the best work on display.

McGuire, who studied art at SUNY/Purchase, has fiddled with themes and styles through a relatively short career. Now, she says, she has reduced her palette, concentrated on composition, removed the extraneous details that troubled her work in the past and aims to deliver heightened mood.

Sometimes she succeeds, many times she does not.

What strikes me most about McGuire is her bravery and her inconsistency. Certainly any artist exposes her ego in public with every exhibition. And I suspect a busy mother of four young daughters has to find extra time to fill an entire show ­­— even one with only 29 pieces. This may be why some of the works, especially the small ones, feel amateurish, throw-away. And I wish the one figurative piece had been withheld.

McGuire’s architectural pictures can be very good: moody, often spare, sometimes almost hygienically realistic and detailed, as if the subjects had been power washed of dirt and grime and even age. These images are clearly idealized, as in “Intersection” in Millerton, rendered without the ugly traffic light or power wires. It is as clean and new as an unused movie set.

The same feeling of anticipation, of waiting for something to happen imbues “Night at the Plaza,” a somber, lonely, unpeopled rendering of Trotta’s Plaza in Sharon. The picture recalls a haunting painting, from last year’s multi-artist library exhibition, of the Sharon gas station across the street at night, with perhaps dangerous darkness relieved only by the station’s outdoor and inside lights. The station, hemmed in by the dark, is a refuge.(She has repeated that scene in a smaller, less successful version for the current show.)

There is another stylized, not-quite-realistic painting of a business building at night: Saperstein’s store in Millerton glows, reflected in what one realizes is a wet street. Sky and trees and even the white church to the right are shadowy, but the store blazes with the warm light of safety.

McGuire paints from photographs and sketches. This works well for her architectural subjects, which include a few nice white houses, especially one across from Lion Rock Farm on Route 41 in Lakeville shown against a threatening blue-black sky. But not so well for landscapes or for repeats of prior paintings.

Pure landscape is weak in McGuire’s hands: Too broad; too like illustration. But she can surprise: A large, moody picture of roiling clouds over a low, horizontal strip of green land is different from any other in the show and it’s quite good. It reminds me of Eric Forstmann’s landscapes ­— all about sky — without his controlled technique or fine line. It was also the first to sell (as a wife’s Valentine gift to her husband).

And then there are McGuire’s woodpiles. She seems devoted to these stylized, unnaturally colored stacks of what to me resemble lengths of PVC pipe. But her admirers like them, too, and they sell. And art is also a business.

“Colleen McGuire” continues at the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon through March 31. Beginning Sunday, Feb. 20, the library will be open every day of the week with some late hours. Call 860 364-5041 or go to www.hotchkisslibrary.org.