AMARILLO.- The Amarillo Museum of Art will close this weekend the exhibit Four Artists-Four Directions. The show an eclectic show of diverse artists, each with a strong message for the viewer. Kate Breakey currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. As a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas she first conceived her project that has now spanned nearly a decade. She tried to rescue a sparrow from the claws of a cat. As she said in a 1999 interview, "I realized I couldn't help the circumstances of its death, but I could memorialize it in a photograph." Like the early practitioners of mementos mori paintings and photographs, Breakey embraces death as part of life, understanding their parallels. She photographs her subjects and then painstakingly paints each feather and stamen its true natural color, enlarging them to 32 x 32", Breakey paints back the colors death has absorbed. These larger-than-life portraits act as memorials to the small creatures she has found. The resulting images are both startlingly beautiful and arresting, as small creatures and objects gain a heroic status. All works from Kate Breakey are on loan from the Witliff Gallery of Southwestern & Mexican Photography at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.

Edwin Mieczkowski is regarded as a leader of geometric and perceptual abstraction during the latter part of the 20th century. His work first came to international prominence in the mid-20th century with is inclusion in The Responsive Eye exhibition, the nation’s first major exhibition of perceptual art, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. He took the elegant relationships between surfaces, points, lines and angles and made a dazzling art form from them. His work has its own purity of expression. He realizes the psychology of perception has the capacity to create new, active collaboration between artist and viewer. He has spent four decades producing geometrically elegant paintings, drawings and sculptures. Collectively, this body of work represents some of the finest examples of the genre of modern art that is known broadly as perceptual abstraction. A solo retrospective of his work opens at LewAllen Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe last spring 2006. All works from Ed Mieczkowski are on loan from LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.

Sam Scott is one of America’s most articulate lyrical painters of nature. His work celebrates life in all its aspects. Whether he paints about the seasons, the clouds, a desert storm, or the human spirit, his palette and compositions are universal. His paintings are rich with luscious color and graceful gesture. But it is his ability to give us the spirit in the objects that makes his work especially noteworthy. Scott has said, “I think of myself as a nature painter. What interests me is the idea of using nature as a source – with a lyric voice that is essentially a celebratory voice. I view painting as an act of giving back to life.” Critics have said that his new paintings tremble with beauty and hope – in the extraordinary range of his colors, the genius and energy of his brushstrokes, the timeless essence of his presentation. His work is always fresh, always engaging. All works from Sam Scott are on loan from the Wiford Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.

Jeanette Pasin-Sloan uses a photo-realistic style to depict reflective objects set against patterned backgrounds. She infuses the traditional genre of still life painting with highly abstract tendencies. Closely-cropped and set in carefully manipulated compositions, the subject matter of Pasin Sloan’s work takes second stage to its formal intensity. She defines her own paintings and prints as modern. Her art could only have been made toward the end of the twentieth century. The subjects she depicts, from elegant Revere Ware bowls to everyday soda cans are thoroughly modern in design. All works from Jeanette Pasin-Sloan are on loan from the artist.