Be pleasantly surprised by... intriguing Homewood galleries

DS Art

2805 Crescent Avenue, Homewood

Another interesting site to visit is the working studio gallery called DS Art.

Operated by artists Don Stewart and Sue Ellen Brown, one large space is devoted to display and production, an open and free-wheeling atmosphere of creative effort.

Brown is an accomplished illustrator of books and fairy tales. She designs greeting cards and works on commission, producing charming and whimsical imagery. Brown also shows real promise as a lyrical nonobjective abstractionist. Her large paintings are elegant, sweeping flights of fancy.

Stewart has the skill of an illustrator and the sense of humor of a satirist, producing badge-like images filled with inventive humor. With a ball point pen he creates single subject images of recognizable things that are composed of objects that may have little or nothing to do with the subject. It is a quirky kind of surrealism that becomes a game of cognition reminiscent of the outrageous vegetable and fruit faces by the Baroque artist Giuseppi Arcimboldo. Funny and clever, Stewart's drawings are not what they appear to be but are what he intends them to be. His ``Rock Lobster" looks like a fully opened Swiss army knife. ``Quack" is a duck constructed of a doctor's black bag augmented by a variety of examination tools. He creates a Volkswagen ``Bug" out of insect parts and his ``Sir Realism" is the armor of a knight made up of emblematic bits and pieces. No musical instrument is safe from his wickedly witty pen. Sports equipment provides ample imagery. A catcher's mitt has a miniature ball park stadium palm with peanuts, a popcorn box and hot dog articulating part of the glove that also has fingers made up of a shoe, catchers mask, score card, bats and cap.