Through Nov. 15, Katherine Butler Gallery in Towles Court is showing work by the dynamic duo Norine and David Zapata. The installation presents an interesting pairing of the two artists’ work. David is a photographer and Norine is a painter. They both focus on aspects of nature in their work.
Norine gives the “big” picture view in her acrylic on canvas landscapes; David zeroes in on the details of plants and crops his views with his digital camera to draw our attention to what we might not otherwise notice such as the color of the veins on the leaf of a plant. Both artists are interested in contrast of dark and light in their compositions.
Norine was born on Cape Cod and grew up there. She moved to Sarasota in 1969 to attend the Ringling School of Art and Design. David was born in Northampton, Mass., and raised in the Berkshires, moving to Sarasota in 1970.
In “Late Afternoon Heat” Norine has painted a stand of trees isolated in a field. Long purple strokes of paint shadow the bright yellow flatness of the plane of earth. Dark dense greens of leaves and browns of bark create a sharp silhouette against a baby blue sky. Zapata unites her compositions using the yellow of the field to highlight the sun dapple in the trees. She varies her horizon line:  Sometimes it is high, sometimes low and sometimes just in the middle.
“Corner Passage” takes us into a meadow where everything is soft and lush. It is not a dead end but an oasis on our journey across the picture plane. She opens up spaces for relaxation.
With his square format David centers our attention in his Botanicals series on a palm frond or leaf as a point of departure for his study and our contemplation of light, color, form and texture. In (DZ 504-2) we narrow our eyes on the small brown lines on the surface of a leaf and forget that is what we are looking at, instead imagining a brown thread embroidering a green textile. He encourages us to marvel at the order and beauty of nature.

In (DZ 515-3) he has cropped what appears to be a number of palm fronds so that we see only the husky edge of their bases. At first they appear to be something else – an alligator – the brown edges looking like teeth. And it really does not matter where our mind wanders because it comes back to the plant form and we see it in a different way.  Helping us focus on details Zapata reminds us how little we really know about plants and how little we actually see when we look at them.
A new artist to the Butler Gallery, Elizabeth St. Hilaire Nelson makes collages of roosters framed with wood from old barns that give her work a sense of history.  Her created creatures are each in a different posture or pose and they are riveting.
Two new jewelers are also showing designs at the gallery.  Kelly Frimel, who is in her 20s, is designing hip, fun and fantastic pieces weaving beads over glass, mixing in found objects and also making sublimely simple necklaces and earrings with delicate gold chains and crystals. Sonya Fraser’s designs are no less interesting only more massive. Her compositions with larger stones, shells and glass are unusual and well crafted.