Like many of his fellow Americans, Jack Spencer wasn’t happy when United States forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. His “This Land” series grew out of a deep concern about what kind of country America was at the beginning of the Second Gulf War. “I was pretty pissed about the U.S. going to war and disgusted with all the American flag waving going on … all the hyper-patriotism that permeated the air during that time,” he says. “I took a 9,000-mile driving trip out and around the West. I tried avoiding the cliché of American flags painted on barn roofs and flags planted everywhere along the way. Then at Wounded Knee (Pine Ridge), there was a small tattered flag on the gatepost of a cemetery high on a hill. It seemed like an indictment, yet the irony was palpable. “When I got home, I started making the darkroom prints, and for some reason I started distressing them — tearing the edges, gouging the surfaces, splattering them with caustic substances.

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The sky is not the limit for artist Veda Reed, it’s just the starting point. The Oklahoma-native will be exhibiting a collection of her works, inspired by the wide-open skies of the western prairies, at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art. The exhibit, Veda Reed: Oklahoma Skies, will open March 26 and run through May 12. An opening reception for Reed will be held at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art, 511 N. Water St., Tuscumbia, Ala., 35674, at 1 p.m. March 26 where she will meet and talk with visitors. Reed said she’s influenced by the open landscapes of her home state. “Actually, I was more down to earth in college and always considered myself a landscape painter,” she said. “Growing up and living in Oklahoma, there are very few trees, one could see the horizon. I began to look up and the sky became the major interest.” Reed added she doesn’t just paint clouds, but she studies them too.

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"In March 2017, University of Texas Press publishes This Land: An American Portrait, a visual meditation on American landscape and identity by longtime Oxford American contributor Jack Spencer. The photographer spent thirteen years working on the project and traveled more than eighty thousand miles across all forty-eight contiguous states looking for scenes and moments that he says, are "an expression of the perception of an ideal."

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Fine art photographer Jack Spencer presents his new book, "This Land: An American Portrait."

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Critics can usually finesse a relationship between two artists having simultaneous gallery exhibitions, as in “Notice how chartreuse dominates in each of their works” or “You cannot avoid perceiving the resonance between the curvilinear forms each artist employs.” Not so in the case of Rana Rochat’s “New Work” and Dwayne Butcher’s “Memphis,” through April 22 at David Lusk Gallery. Don’t strain at gnats, my friends; just enjoy each artist’s work for what it is and what it accomplishes.

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It is currently Armory Week in New York City. The 11 art fairs, consisting of hundreds of galleries and thousands of artists, are spread across Manhattan. Memphis’ own David Lusk Gallery is participating in Art on Paper. Full disclosure, I am represented by DLG and have eight pieces in this fair. Other artists from the gallery that are participating are Maysey Craddock, Anne Siems, William Christenberry, Kathleen Holder, Tyler Hildebrand, and Tim Crowder.

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Jack Spencer, modern master of American photography, has two new books of work coming out this spring. The first, titled This Land, captures with consummate artistry the heart-stopping grandeur we take for granted in this abundant country, your land and mine.

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The view from my bedroom window last week was spectacular.  I found out later this cloud formation is known as a “Mackerel Sky”.  I had to know more so I asked Wiki: A mackerel sky is a common term for a sky with rows of cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds displaying an undulating, rippling pattern similar in appearance to fish scales;^[1][2] this is caused by high altitude atmospheric waves. But a little more reading revealed further  gifts: Other phrases in weather lore take mackerel skies as a sign of changeable weather. Examples include “Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry”, and “A dappled sky, like a painted woman, soon changes its face”.^[4]   and also: It is sometimes known as a buttermilk sky, particularly when in the early cirrocumulus stage, in reference to the clouds’ “curdled” appearance.^[7] In France it is sometimes called a ciel moutonné (fleecy sky); and in Spain a cielo empedrado (cobbled sky);^[8] in Germany it is known as Schäfchenwolken (sheep clouds), and in Italy the clouds are known as pecorelli (little sheep).

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Hamlett Dobbins’s new exhibition at David Lusk Gallery in Nashville, “I Will Have To Tell You Everything,” is a perfectly titled show of about a dozen paintings that resist specific interpretations while also demonstrating Dobbins’s extraordinary technical ability as a non-figurative painter. Outside of reading the artist’s statement, it’s difficult to discern any underlying narratives or themes beyond these works’ gorgeous formal elements.

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Memphis-based artist Hamlett Dobbins’s latest collection of acrylic paintings epitomizes one of the greatest challenges posed by visual abstraction: the suggestion of specific artistic intent as expressed only by pure color and form. A lack of figuration can frequently source a dichotomy for viewers, a push and pull between the intellectual curiosity enabled by non-representational elements and the desire to uncloak a particular narrative, sentiment, and/or motivation at the core of a work. Perhaps this is why Dobbins has appropriately called his exhibition of untitled abstract paintings I Will Have to Tell You Everything on view at the David Lusk Gallery through the month of January. “The artist presents to viewers paintings that look to be cognitively taxing yet ultimately gratifying labors of love achieved only after many long, hard hours of focused meditation.”

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