New Art Exhibit at the Beck Center

The first thing you see is a blue hat. The subject’s eyes downcast, lips reaching towards her ears.

Allowing your attention to drift from the massive painting, the accompanying description reads “Disco Blue: farewell for carwash.”

This, among the other pieces blanketing the Cleveland Artist Foundation’s gallery in , is a retrospective in honor of Shirley Aley Campbell’s work – The Way of All Flesh.

On Friday night, the opening of the exhibit, which will run through Oct. 29, a small group of people roamed the space, losing themselves in one way or another.

“It’s like tic tac toe with flesh,” a man commented to his friend as he gazed at a series of nine paintings, each depicting a different male body part. “It’s beautiful.”

Sketched in the corner of one canvas was “the Wicked Witch of the West,” who, before melting, lived in Cleveland.

Rotating from image to image to image and then back again, contours leap from the canvases, as if topographic.   

So simple the subject matter. Models neither sleek nor glamorous, but human.

Fingers sinking into flesh in folds. Wrinkles.

Smudged eyeliner. Awkward adolescence. Nude bodies without faces.

Also, self-portraits including one of Campbell deep in the grips of thought, her head leaning on a larger than life hand, a paintbrush gripped in the other.

A note adhered next to a portrait of the artist’s legs reflected read, “Though there are several portraits in this exhibition, Campbell has remarked that she rarely paints her own image because in doing so “you see too much of yourself.”

Dressed in a black suit and comfortable black sneakers, she happily chatted with anyone who walked up to her, smiling eyes shining through her glasses.

“I don’t know why I keep going,” Campbell said to a room of applauding admirers after being introduced formally. “But I do.”