The Arts Company, Wes Sherman. Sherman bases his paintings on Old Master artworks, but not in the form of derivative visual quotations. He boils down the massings and colors of those works into graceful abstractions that echo the massings and colors of the older works. I find Sherman’s results stand on their own very well, but they serve as a gloss on these other paintings, pointing out ways to look at their essential structures. One of his paintings in this year’s show is based on O’Keefe’s Radiator Building, a tribute to this big piece of Nashville’s artistic legacy and a sad reminder of the possibility that the painting will leave town after the lawyers get done.

Written by David Maddox