It's a threefer: An artistic makeover, creepy dolls and pointillist musicians
Providence Journal - Thursday, July 23, 2009
Bill Van Siclen

August is music-making time in the Ocean State, thanks to Newport's annual folk (Aug. 1-2) and jazz (Aug. 7-9) festivals. With that in mind, Wickford's Eveline Luppi Gallery has put together a small but engaging exhibit celebrating music and musicians.

New York painter Francine Demeulenaere, for example, contributes a series of bright, paint-speckled studies of drummers, guitarists and other street musicians. Pointillism, the dot-happy style associated with artists such as George Seurat and Paul Signac, is clearly an inspiration for these works, which employ a similar language of painterly dots and dashes. At the same time, the paintings have a sketch-like freshness that seems to suit their musical subjects.

My only criticism: Compared with masters like Seurat and Signac, Demeulenaere's paint-by-dots approach has a tendency to feel too repetitive for its own good.

Gallery owner Eveline Luppi, meanwhile, takes a more abstract route, surrounding recognizable images of musicians and musical instruments with sinuous Cubist-style textures and patterns. It's nice work, although Luppi, who studied at the famed New York Art Students League before moving to Wickford, would probably benefit from a bolder palette of colors.