'Egg Plant' - oil and texture on canvas.
Sana Rose, Contributor
TWENTY-SIX-year-old young artist Andy Ballentine is offering a small collection of work for viewing at Gallery Pegasus in New Kingston. A painter of scenes and arranged objects, he, interestingly, has only four years of professional experience since viewers started taking notice of him in 2000.
Ballentine, at such an early point in his career shows a lot of potential and a sincerity that permeates his work. His work is in no way pretentious or obtrusive, makes no grand statements but calmly and invitingly presents images born of observation.
Of the subjects he presents the figure, landscape and objects still life is the strongest. A protégé of well-known local painter Judy-Ann McMillan and a current student of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, he has a fairly strong sense of composition and the
warmth of his palette is engaging. Ballentine's weaknesses show in his limited understanding of how light falls on objects and how to use this to create the illusion of form. In some pieces, his range of tones is much too narrow to sufficiently create the effect of round objects and in the smallest paintings especially, the objects are flat.
We do sense though, in the larger still-lifes, his honesty in trying to capture the images, which radiate with intimacy. Yams, carrots, peppers, apples, sweet sops, mangoes and breadfruits are intermingled with baskets or fabric or are just left on their own on tables. The objects are placed next to each other, conjuring images of good, old-fashioned Jamaican meals.
MacMillan herself must serve as an inspiration along with other Jamaican artists who, from time to time, choose to put a spotlight on solely objects of daily life in their paintings. Among them is Albert Huie, although he has a love for flowers, unlike Ballentine who favours fruits and vegetables. In foreign lands, he finds models in French painters, among others such as 18th century Rococo period painter Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin; turn of the 19th century painter Edouard Manet and Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne. Fruit Basket No. 1 is particularly reminiscent of Cezanne.
Ballentine's visual temperament is certainly more modest than that of the structural power of Cezanne, the gestural flamboyance of Manet and combinations of these qualities in Huie. Although he doesn't smooth out all of his paintstrokes, visually he is predisposed to somewhat of a softer rendition of his objects, which makes Chardin, although miles apart in geography and century, a close visual link.
The quiet simplicity of Country Food, Dinner Time, Soup Time and Eleven Tropical Fruits attest to this. It must be noted that Ballentine is not given to the inclusion of distinctive backgrounds in his images. He presents them plainly to us, undisturbed by the objects' environs such as kitchen scenes or what he might otherwise consider to be superfluous additions to the images.
Simple, everyday arrangements and inspire quiet contemplation, Ballentine's present and future offerings and, if he strengthens this quality along with technical mastery it will result in far more striking pictures.
The exhibition continues until May 29.
