This past Friday evening, Slocumb galleries closed an exhibit featuring the work of David Young, a realist painter whose work focuses on portraits and still-lives, and Ron Buffington, a painter and printmaker exploring images that involve geometric abstraction.
Young is an assistant professor of art in painting, drawing and 2-D foundations at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.
Currently teaching all levels of drawing curriculum and direct independent study projects at UTC, he has also taught at the Interlochen Arts Academy and his work has been shown at galleries in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Cortona, Italy, the Fruitlands Museum and the Hunter Museum of American Art.
Buffington is the UC Foundation associate professor of painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States. With collections of his work in such places as UCLA, Yale and Harvard University, the artist has also been included in the publication New American Paintings by the Open Studios Press in Boston twice.
There is something haunting about a solitary figure staring out at you from across the painted canvas. The subject easily engages the viewer through direct eye contact, leaving them a curious voyeur with raised eyebrow and wrinkled forehead by the time the gallery visit is over. My curiosities were certainly enlivened by the figurative work of David Young.
The strange relationship between painted subject and viewer was realized most vividly by me at an early age when I saw the screen version of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book The Witches.
In the film, a little girl named Erika disappears while fetching some milk and bread from the market. She is never found. One day, however, her father notices something that turns his ruddy complexion a shade of white, as if he had seen a ghost. There was Erika, trapped in a Dutch painting of a farmhouse and animals that hung above the family’s fireplace.
As the years went by, she continued to live in the painting. Sometimes she would be feeding the chickens. Other times she would stare out of the farmhouse window. She became older and older and continued to age until she disappeared from the framed picture.
As a child, this story struck me not only because I shared the same name as the unfortunate little girl, but because I had always reserved a particular feeling about painted portraits – the feeling that there was another very distinct world that existed in the canvas.
A section of the exhibition consisted of a large wall covered with five equally large paintings – with one primary subject against a single colored backdrop. Placed one next to another in the exibition, the paintings seemed homogenous, each detail of the first relating to the next.
According to the artist, the wall of images were related. “I don’t really know why the image of a hurt male and two beautiful females occurs in my work,” said Young, explaining that he does, however, realize that it has been a part of his artistic psyche for a long time.
A bird perched atop a branch floating in a sea of cadmium red. A woman holding a stem with two lily blossoms. A man with a broken finger stands in a slightly crooked fashion, his finger almost too painful to look at. A slender female against a flat, deep yellow stands with arms crossed, glaring through rectangular spectacles with a blue bird perched on her hand. Her plaid pants and cropped hair are a far cry from the elaborately draped gowns and garish curls worn by the female subjects of Ingres or Vigee-Lebrun. She is the contemporary and the everyday, so it seems that the world she inhabits is a place not unlike our own. In this instance I feel like a part of that place is mine – where a man with a broken finger might be, or where a little bird hovers in flat black on a faraway branch, as far away as it would be in reality.
Using printmaking and rich, buttery swathes of paint, Ron Buffington creates sturdy abstractions thoughtfully worked to completion.
The wonders of the architectural process may be unrealized by the average person, but the importance of the elements that make up a complete structure are evident to most.
Building something out of nothing is Ron Buffington’s forte. The types of structures not usually classified as architecture fascinate him. Such unlikely things as kilns, dumpsters, military bunkers and old ruins inspire the painter who admits he is attracted to what he calls “marginal architecture.”
Prints known as monotypes are utilized in some of his compositions. These singularly individual prints (only one print of each image made) undergo multiple plate monoprinting and each goes through the press four or five times. These images are some of the elements that join with the artist’s other abstract painting sensibilities rooted in architectural imagery.
“They are not derived directly from any one architecture,” Buffington said. “I build the image the way you would build a building.”
Consequently, much revision and adjustment goes into the paintings. Composing anywhere from eight to 20 pieces at a time, “things bounce back and forth,” the artist explained. The work is then delightfully interconnected.
Each piece on the wall of Buffington’s exhibit was a carfefully articulated thought. So much so, it was as if the gallery were exuding a varied and continuous whisper, where patches of color rest and accumulate, the results being works of permanent beauty and simplicity.
Stay tuned for more exciting exhibits from Slocumb Galleries, located in the department of art and design, Ball Hall.

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