Folkston woman subject of 2-day search found in apparent good health, GBI says

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is continuing to look into the whereabouts of Folkston woman over a two-day period when she was the object of a massive search.

Tasheka Maria Campbell, who had last been seen about 10:45 a.m. Monday, walked up to a man’s house off Homeland Park Road north of Folkston about 8:40 p.m. Wednesday, said Mike McDaniel, special agent in charge of the GBI’s Kingsland office. Campbell reappeared two days after her car was found abandoned beside the road with a wheel bent from having struck a culvert, he said.

All agents have been told so far is that Campbell had been in the wooded area close to where her car was found, McDaniel said.

“For having been out in the elements 48 hours, she appeared to be in good condition,’’ he said. “All I can tell you is we’re continuing to investigate.”

The GBI began looking for Campbell Tuesday at the request of the Charlton County Sheriff’s Office and put out a public notice for information on her whereabouts.

Meanwhile, the Camden County Sheriff’s Office tried to find her with tracking dogs, a Georgia State Patrol helicopter crew searched overhead for two days and there were patrols on foot and on all terrain vehicles that covered about 30 acres around where the car was found, McDaniel said.

“We conducted a grid search,’’ McDaniel said.

The Charlton County Sheriff’s Office, Brantley County Emergency Management Agency, Georgia State Patrol, Folkston police, Georgia Department of Natural Resources rangers, U.S. Marshals Service, Georgia Department of Corrections, Georgia probation officers and others looked and found no clue that led to Campbell, McDaniel said.

McDaniel said he was very grateful that Campbell was found alive in apparent good health.

Terry Dickson: (912) 264-0405

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Amid Intimate Galleries, a Jewel of a Painting Collection

The next several days promise to be unusually euphoric for the nation’s capital, even by the standards of past presidential inaugurations. If you’re in town for this historic event and have some extra time, you can always duck into the National Gallery of Art without clouding your elation. Thanks to the museum’s magnificent painting collection, the euphoria possible inside its walls can easily match the mood outside. It may also strike you as similarly alive with a sense of human possibility.

The National Gallery, founded in 1937 as a gift to the nation from the financier Andrew W. Mellon, opened its doors in 1941. It is the jewel in the crown of Washington’s many great museums. It is open, with free admission, 363 days a year, although this year that number will drop to 362. Like many institutions along the Mall, it will be closed on Inauguration Day.

Although the gallery has impressive holdings in prints, drawings, photography, the decorative arts and especially sculpture, it is not an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others across the nation. Its art is almost entirely European and American, and its long suit by far is painting.

The bulk of the National Gallery’s paintings are arrayed on its vast main floor, where warrens of wonderfully intimate galleries feed into two long halls that meet at a domed rotunda. It is as if the arcades of the Palais Royale in Paris were attached to either side of the Pantheon in Rome.

The galleries are numbered, and the first 25 or so offer an amazing review of the font of Western painting in 13th- to 16th-century Italy, especially if you attend primarily to the abundant renderings of the Madonna and Child. The starting point is “Madonna and Child Enthroned” by Margaritone d’Arezzo in Gallery 1. Dated around 1270, it encapsulates the gold ground, frozen poses and flattened space of Byzantine art.

One possible end point is “The Alba Madonna,” Raphael’s glorious tondo from around 1510 in Gallery 20. Here the Madonna leans toward the Christ Child like a mother (albeit a very dignified mother) on a picnic; the graceful, fully rounded figures occupy an immense dome of crystalline, blue-skied space that stretches out behind them.

In between these two paintings virtually every Italian painter of the time seems to weigh in on the subject, as well as on how to render the figure expressively in space. The progression of works gives unusual force to both the idealism and realism of the High Renaissance. Of course the Renaissance portraits in these rooms are not small change, starting with Leonardo’s ineffable “Ginevra de’ Benci” (Gallery 6).

Across the hall the Northern Renaissance and its repercussions unfold almost as compellingly, with scores of must-see galleries, including two (48 and 51) devoted to Rembrandt and his school. One of the choicest places to pause is Gallery 39, where you’ll find three pinnacles of the astounding realism favored in Germany and the Netherlands.

First is Jan van Eyck’s meticulous “Annunciation,” from around 1434-6, in which the Angel Gabriel finds Mary in a Gothic church standing on a carpet whose delicate lines depict scenes from the Old Testament. Second is Petrus Christus’s grand “Nativity,” from around 1450. The elaborate manger includes an arch decorated with statues of Adam and Eve and a peaked roof with green leaves sprouting from a horizontal beam directly above the Christ Child. Yet this sign of growth and hope is framed by a triangle of spindly wood that subtly evokes torturously stretched arms, as on the Cross. Third is Rogier van der Weyden’s luxuriously austere “Portrait of a Lady” of around 1460, her delicate face framed by white veils in a shape reminiscent of a sphinx.

A quick stop in Gallery 50C, not much bigger than a large closet, will bring you face to face with Vermeer’s dewy “Girl With the Red Hat” (1665-66), turning around to peer out of the picture so quickly that you can almost hear the rustling of her blue silk garment. The space behind her is muffled by a yellow and green tapestry in soft focus.

On the other side of the rotunda, French Impressionism and a few galleries of American art await. (More are in the process of being reinstalled after a temporary exhibition, along with galleries of British art.) Among the Impressionists, keep an eye out for Cézanne’s rough-surfaced, all-thumbs portrait of his domineering father in Gallery 83. He is clothed like a laborer, despite being a banker (as he thought Cézanne should have been) and is shown seated beneath one of his son’s still lifes, reading a newspaper that favorably reviewed his son’s work.

Another standout in this section is Gauguin’s “Still Life With Peonies” (Gallery 84), a relatively unfamiliar work painted in a quasi-Impressionistic manner but with the deep reds, greens and yellows typical of Gauguin’s mature style. An early work, it shows Gauguin’s bowing to his elders, probably by depicting art that he owned: part of a drawing by Degas is visible, tacked to the wall, along with a village scene that might be by Pissarro.

More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2009, on page C32 of the New York edition.

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SHOPPING WITH : DAVID SERRANO | Antidote to a Grungy Beige Dorm Room

SARAH LUPTON, a 21-year-old English major at Duke University, had a simple approach to dorm living: move out. But when her off-campus living arrangement fell through this summer, she found herself locked into yet another “grungy and beige” campus residence for her senior year.

Her solution was intense color. She painted her bedroom walls green and covered the ceiling with fabric she got on sale at Hancock Fabrics in Durham, N.C., for about $5 a yard. (The fabric was tacked or nailed on.)

The bedspread, curtain, Tibetan prayer flags and altar artifacts came from India, where she traveled last summer. She estimates their cost at about $50. The ceiling fixture is a $7 paper lantern from World Market, where Ms. Lupton also found a string of small boxed lights for $15.

The rich colors in Ms. Lupton’s room were so appealing that she and her roommate, Carolyn McDaniel, a 20-year-old theater studies major, decided to extend them throughout their two-bedroom suite.

They painted the living room bright red, and their kitchen and Ms. McDaniel’s room bright yellow. Then, Ms. Lupton says, they “kind of Jackson Pollocked” her roommate’s bedroom, splattering the leftover red paint on the yellow walls.

The result has been a great success.

“Now, we have people over for dinner all the time,” Ms. Lupton says. “It’s a really nice space, everyone likes it. You spend so much time in your place, you want to make it really nice.”

At the end of the school year, she says, she and Ms. McDaniel will be required to return the apartment to its original beige, but to them it’s worth it.

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For Serene Transport, Hudson River School Paintings

TRANQUIL William Trost Richards’s “Along the Atlantic” (1870).

There aren’t too many exhibitions that seem perfectly at home at the Nassau County Museum of Art, housed in a Georgian mansion that once belonged to the family of Henry Clay Frick, a founder of United States Steel.

Skip to next paragraph Top, Frank Anderson’s “Breakneck Mountain, Hudson Highlands” (1878). Bottom, Thomas Moran’s “Long Island Landscape” (1902).

But the current exhibition of 30 late 19th-century Hudson River School paintings, “Poetic Journey: Hudson River School Paintings From the Grey Collection,” is one of them. The paintings are from the same era as the house, and they are domestic in scale, made to be hung in rooms like those at the museum.

The paintings belong to the Brookville-based collectors David and Laura Grey. They are a lovely group of pictures, acquired over many, many years with the kind of dedication, discernment and patience rarely found among private collectors. It was also shrewd buying, for these days it would be impossible to assemble a collection of similar quality and strength. On hand are works by most of the Hudson River School masters, including Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness and Thomas Cole.

I have previously reviewed portions of this collection at museums in Connecticut and Westchester, but it looks particularly good here. It sparkles, as much for the rare beauty as for the concentration of works from the pivotal decades of the 1850s and 1860s, when the second — and arguably the more talented and famous — generation of Hudson River School painters emerged after the death of Thomas Cole, the school’s founder.

The works are loosely arranged into several themes, around which the paintings in the collection tend to be clustered. Those in the first grouping are earlier than the rest and generally more classically inspired. Here you will find Cole’s “Tower by Moonlight” (1838), inspired by a richly descriptive narrative poem, “Love,” by the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Formally, however, it reminds you of the work of the 17th-century French neo-Classical painter Claude Lorrain.

Foliage and wilderness tend to dominate the second group, which contains several wonderful paintings. If I had to pick one to linger over, it would be Thomas Moran’s “Long Island Landscape” (1902), which, although significantly later than a lot of the other works here, reminds us of what Long Island once looked like. It is a bright painting of mature trees and thick underbrush along the banks of a stream, a study in the tranquil but rugged beauty of the Northeast coastal landscape.

From here the show detours into works by artists of the second generation of the Hudson River School that are associated with the Luminist movement in American art. Luminism is a mid-19th-century landscape painting style characterized by hazy effects of light and atmosphere and invisible brushwork. Notable examples here include the airy panoramas “An October Afternoon on the Juniata” (1879) by Sanford Robinson Gifford and “Arcadia” (circa 1850) by John Frederick Kensett.

Of course, the Hudson River School acquired its name because the artists primarily painted scenery along the river. There is no shortage of these sorts of works here, among them Frank Anderson’s “Breakneck Mountain, Hudson Highlands” (1878), Lemuel Maynard Wiles’s “Cove Near West Point” (1867), George Inness’s “Across the Hudson Valley, Foothills of the Catskills” (1868) and Samuel Colman’s “Barges on the Hudson” (1867), arguably the show’s best work and a definite candidate for the term masterpiece, whatever that means these days. A simple, tranquil river scene, it is very atmospheric, with a dramatic sky and shimmering water.

There is a small section devoted to seascapes and scenes of water followed by a group from the American West. Two paintings of animals at sunset in a vast and open landscape by Albert Bierstadt set the overall tone, followed by a dramatic view of Yosemite by Thomas Hill, painted circa 1887. It looks down into the Yosemite Valley, following the line of the Merced River, with natural landmarks like Sentinel Rock visible in the distance. The scene is enveloped in a light morning mist.

I stood looking at this work for some time, eventually imagining that I was there, standing on the cliff looking down into the valley; I could almost feel the wind on my face.

Eventually I drifted back to reality, gathered my notebook and left the museum. Thinking about this experience later, I was reminded of what is so pleasurable about the experience of a great work of art: For a brief moment, it allows you to forget where you are and be transported to another time and place.

?Poetic Journey: Hudson River School Paintings From the Grey Collection,? Nassau County Museum of Art, 1 Museum Drive, Roslyn Harbor, through March 15. Information: (516) 484-9337 or nassaumuseum.com.

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