BY RICK DE YAMPERT

Step into Stetson University’s Hand Art Center to view the exhibition “The Artist’s Labor: Oscar Bluemner and Mario Saponaro,” and you may think you’ve stepped into Mr. Peabody’s Way-Back Machine to return to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

The landscapes and cityscapes of the German-born Bluemner (1867-1938), who immigrated to the U.S. in 1892, reveal why he is now an acclaimed American Modernist painter. Bluemner’s works, through his bold use of color, minimal detail and stark lines delineating trees, bridges, mountains and castles, are striking. His works remain comfortable to contemporary eyes.

Not so of the Pop Art redux of Saponaro, a spring 2023 Stetson grad with a double major in studio art and art history. Those pop artists of the 1960s and beyond giddily took inspiration, and even source materials, from pop culture, advertising and consumer culture. In Saponaro’s case, he embraces a comic-strip aesthetic to create his “Goblins” — strange yet familiar, oddly human creatures that are jolting, fascinating, puzzling, fun and thought-provoking.

As disparate as the art of Bluemner and Saponaro is, Stetson associate professor of art history Katya Kudryavtseva, who also is the Vera Bluemner Kouba curator for the Hand Art Center, had a method to her madness in juxtaposing the two artists in one show.

In her curator’s statement that accompanies the artworks on the walls of the Hand, she writes, “At first glance, this pairing might appear unconventional: Bluemner’s landscapes clash with Saponaro’s fantastical creatures. Yet, a common thread binds these artists together — their profound dedication to their craft. The exhibition delves into the very core of the artistic process, illuminating the shared spirit of creativity and experimentation that drives them both.”

Bluemner’s color-rich 1922 work Abruzzi Mountains, one of the gems of the exhibition, would fit snugly beside Marsden Hartley’s 1920 Landscape, New Mexico and Georgia O’Keeffe’s many paintings of her beloved Pedernal, the mesa near her northern New Mexico home (although O’Keeffe would occasionally toss a surreal, errant cow skull into the sky of her desert landscapes).

An adjacent Bluemner black-and-gray pencil sketch of Abruzzi illustrates Kudryavtseva’s intention of revealing the painter’s process of moving from early inspiration to finished work.

Likewise, the exhibition’s pairings of studies and completed works of Bluemner’s The Bridge and The White Cloud.

As intriguing as those pairings are, they pale in comparison to the strange, byzantine journeys made by Saponaro’s muse from initial inspiration to finished work, as evidenced in the “preparatory drawings” and completed works of his Home Maintenance Mandatory series. That series features his “Goblins” — those fantastical, now-whimsical, now-wistful creatures that he variously labels the “Flat Guy,” the “Bunny,” the “Fish” and the “Chameleon.”

Astute patrons who view Saponaro’s four classically rendered, still-life pencil drawings may be able to discern that those still-life hat and egg reappear with the Chameleon in the acrylic painting Nowhere But Back Again.

View the 10-minute documentary looped on a giant video screen in the exhibit space in which Saponaro talks about his process. Or read the artist’s intimate, confessional texts, full of bewilderment and self-doubt, that accompany each still-life, and you may be able to glean how his fantastical creatures came into being on his canvases. Or not.

But that doesn’t mean that “The Artist’s Labor” fails at its mission. Indeed, quite the opposite. The exhibition reveals that the mysteries of creativity are vast, weighty and sometimes (often?) deliciously inscrutable.

Viewing the works of Bluemner and Saponaro side by side, one can’t help but ponder what the 20th-century Modernist would think of his younger, 21st-century colleague and his Pop Art revivalism. The guess here is that ol’ Oscar would smile — and be plunged into deep contemplation about what is going on in the minds and hearts of the Chameleon, the Flat Guy and their fellow Goblins.

For more information about the Hand Art Center, call 386-822-7270 or visit handartcenter.org.

— De Yampert is a freelance writer, musician and artist. He previously worked as the arts and entertainment writer at The Daytona Beach News-Journal for 23 years.