Enamel Art, Take Hama At Frye: Is That All There Is?

"The Cutting Edge: Enamel Art for the Wall and Pedestal" and "Take Hama" at Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry, through Oct. 4. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sundays 12-5 p.m. Free. 622-9250. Take Hama will be at the museum Sunday, 1-4 p.m.

Through Tuesday, "The Cutting Edge," the second Pacific Enameling Symposium, will be held at the University of Washington School of Art. Many exhibitions now on view - including shows at William Traver, Cliff Michel and the Northwest Craft Center - feature the art of melting enamel paint onto metal.

American craft of all kinds now is being scrutinized for its integrity of workmanship, fusion of innovative and traditional techniques and its potential as an option to tired-out conceptual art. Unfortunately, "The Cutting Edge," the conference's official survey at the Frye Art Museum, will not win many converts.

Painting on glass is a form of enameling, too, and Northwest glass artists like John De Wit, Paul Marioni, Cappy Thompson and Dick Weiss steal the show. Broad, expansive gestures in bright colors coat clear blown-glass vases, serving as the perfect "canvas" for mostly figurative images.

Intimate and fussy, other works suffer from a too-tiny size. Bigger is better: A large four-part wall hanging by Karen Guzak and folding screens by Michele Van Slyke and Cheryll Leo-Gwin are all impressive.

University of Washington sculpture professor Norman Taylor's "Self-Portrait with Dancing Ladder" is his best work I've seen. A wild-haired red head perches atop a cast-iron cone.

Witty and wacky, Thom Whalen and Gene Gentry McMahon create lurid men and women in absurd poses.

But works by Mary Klein, Joann Tanzer, Harlan W. Butt and Harold Balasz raise serious questions about many craft artists' grasp of meaning beyond the making of the artwork. Time and again, the appearance of fabrication overshadows subject matter.

"Decorative arts" is the term used by museum personnel to describe crafts, and works by several of the artists succeed only on decorative terms.

Straddling decoration and meaning, Seattleite Jerry Scheideman best coped with the dilemma. "Ancient Muses #11" is a large, dramatic two-part steel painting with animal heads that summon up cave drawings. Colors are subdued and mottled over large areas, all the better to examine the process and then step back to appreciate the prehistoric mood.

There are some gorgeous, shiny surfaces in Take Hama's paintings, too, but, unlike much of the art in "The Cutting Edge," they are always wedded to an appropriate subject: water, sunlight, land.

The veteran Seattle teacher and illustrator has won many admirers over the years and his first Frye show since 1985 will doubtless win many more. Charming, well-executed, sentimental and utterly unchallenging, the art of Take Hama takes its place in the pantheon of local artists deified at the Frye.

He favors the familiar and the exotic. His subjects fall into rough categories of portrait, still life and landscape, much like the 19th-century American Impressionists in the Frye's permanent collection. Each Hama painting is like listening to a virtuoso pianist playing Chopin: brilliant melodies with a few bittersweet notes thrown in.

Absolutely competent but unvaryingly formulaic, each painting seems a model of technique for students to observe: blending colors, creating shadows, slightly twisting perspective.

Miles away from modern art, Take Hama has basically transposed the art of 100 years ago through the filter of a realist-trained artist living today. Reassuring and untroubled, these paintings are the perfect pastime for a Sunday afternoon.