![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rickasinikadour.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/winterexhib-61.jpg?resize=700%2C775\")
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This essay appeared in<\/em> Vermont Art Guide #7. Vermont Art Guide #7<\/a> has nearly two hundred places to see art around the state. The full-color, printed magazine has artist and venue profiles as well as articles and news about Vermont Art. Our goal is to document and share the state\u2019s incredible art scene. SUBSCRIBE TODAY<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe next one I am gonna start is with a chainsaw…I\u2019ve never chainsawed paper but that\u2019s not a bad idea.\u201d Those are the last lines of a video made by Winooski documentarian Dan Higgins during a visit to Edwin Owre\u2019s studio in December 2011. Owre\u2019s comments speak to his particular brand of artmaking: an experimental approach to materials, a disdain for “fussiness”, and a willingness to “give it a go” and see what happens. Architect David Sellers cites Owre as instrumental in establishing a movement of design\/build in which artists and sculptors and architects design and build things in the process of making something. But the cavalier buoyancy with which Owre\u2019s approaches artmaking is tempered by a keen ability to react and respond to movements in art. Owre\u2019s fluency with color, shape, and composition pours out of the constructions on view at the BCA Center this past winter, and, if I may be so bold, suggest that Owre is doing with landscape painting what John Chamberlain did with abstract expressionism. He is bringing it into the third dimension.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rickasinikadour.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/winterexhib-40.jpg?resize=700%2C525\")
\nBrightly colored fragments of plywood are assembled into fields. Barometer of Mercies<\/em>, with its zig-zag geometries and rambling blue shapes evoke the sky. Intersecting white rectangles of Cross Talk<\/em> and a suggestive orange dotted line propose an aerial view of a cityscape. How can one not see the mountain in Fleurs du Mal<\/em>? Standing works use the tabletop as a horizon and rise up from the surface like buildings in a fantastical city. Pinks, blues, and orange hues reflect the palette of today\u2019s painters who see not only green and brown but a blazing range of colors in the atmosphere. At various times, in these works, the paint crosses and combines genres. Raw wood contrasts with refined, smooth surfaces. Thick lines of red, white, and yellow break up luscious fields of swirled paint. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rickasinikadour.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/winterexhib-45.jpg?resize=700%2C524\")
\nThe thing to understand about Owre is his place in Vermont art history. From 1969 to 2003, Owre taught drawing and sculpture at the University of Vermont and over the course of those decades influenced countless contemporary Vermont artists. He taught students to unleash the possibility of mark and gesture, to consider copper tubing and bales of hay as materials, or to chainsaw paper if the mood strikes you.<\/p>\nAbout Vermont Art Guide<\/em><\/h2>\n