Float, Flitter, Fade

NOAH OVERBY

Details

Some Space, 625 First Ave., 718-3104, www.somespacegallery.com. Ends Dec. 28.

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• Noah Overby
• Paper Crafts
• Arts and Crafts

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I am a sucker for images of clouds. And clouds are what Noah Overby's paintings are all about. Entitled "Float, Flitter, Fade," Overby's new work at Some Space offers a pop-y look at the weather. The acrylic-on-canvas pieces depict pale blue skies, with a shorthand of dotted lines for rain, descending from clouds textured with pencil scribblings. Stylistic depictions of clouds are overlaid with paper collage: paper cutouts of clouds, clouds in gold paint, and cartoony clouds cast in smoky swirls of ink. Overby's clouds are almost uniformly puffy: rounded, exaggerated versions of what we so rarely see in Seattle—white clouds against a blue sky. For the most part, these clouds are not wet indicators of oncoming storms. Most are not dark or menacing, though they might leak just a dribble of rain. One thin dotted line, one drip of paint goes long down the canvas. A literal mark of wetness (now dry) symbolizes rain. Sometimes the dotted line does loop-de-loops, perhaps descending from a pencil-marked bundle of clouds. These playful canvases are hung all the way to the back of this frame shop (the guys working there will invite you back to the framing tables to see the whole show), in a series of riffs on the subject. These pieces seem to mull over the sky in a slow, meditative way. The artist's statement, however, tells us that Overby's work was inspired by the concept of wabi-sabi, a Japanese terms that translates very roughly as the aesthetics of impermanence. I wonder if this is a bit overblown for such lighthearted work. And yet, I am taken in by the beauty of this short-lived collection of water molecules, floating in a blue sky like some puffed ideal.