By Marian S. Mclellan
[Excerpt]

JAMES DRAKE
HOLTON ROWER
Arthur Roger Gallery
New Orleans, LA

James Drake: Big Baby, 2010. Pastel on paper, 90 x 52 in. Arthur Roger Gallery.

Over at Arthur Roger Gallery, the red pastel figure drawings and glass sculptures of New Mexico-based James Drake’s “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” and the multidimensional poured paintings of Holton Rower ‘s “Viscous Resin Extruding From the Trunk” evoke styles of the past. The force of Drake’s assured, gestural drawings rests in his ability to maintain the immediacy of a sketchpad, on a very large scale, as in Reclining Female  (58×53) and Big Baby (90×52). New York-based Rower, grandson of no other than Alexander Calder, puts on a kaleidoscopic show of optic mania with bright, energized color thickly poured over a variety of plywood forms, in particular, exaggerated, wall-mounted tree cross-sections often measuring over ten feet in diameter. Get Me What I Want (10×25) dazzles with precise swirly “rings” like a tree growing color, which, for Rower, is eternal.