YOUNGSTOWN

The Butler Institute of American Art's National Midyear Show started 66 year ago, when juried shows were common, and its continued existence bucks the trend among museums.

"Unlike many museums and many institutions -- they've sort of canceled out on contemporary art and they've discontinued a lot of these competitive shows," said painter Gary T. Erbe. "But the Butler has continued this tradition for 60 years."

In keeping the show, the museum has shown it does not want to forsake tradition just to jump on the latest fad.

"Whoever they picked as judge picked representational work, which a lot of places wouldn't," added painter and sculptor Joseph Sheppard, who scored his first national prize at a Midyear 30 years ago.

The show, a survey of American painting, was juried this year by Jerry A. Berger, director of the Springfield (Missouri) Museum of Art.

"What this show does, it reflects the American art scene -- what's going on, what people are doing, what artists are doing," said Erbe, who took this year's first place prize for "Southern Shadows." "There's such a broad range of styles and techniques and subject matter."

While the approach "gives the people of Youngstown a chance to see a much broader scope of American art," Erbe said, it also keeps artists submitting works to try to be a part of it.

"This is my first time for this show and I'm very excited to be included because this is quite a prestigious show,' said Peter Seltzer, who contributed the pastel "Good Fortune."

In Erbe and Seltzer, the Midyear shows how today's artists are embracing tradition, but modernizing it.

Erbe is a trompe l'oeil painter. He uses shadow and perspective to try to fool the viewer's eye that he or she is seeing something that they are not. The most famous tromp l'oeil painters were William Michael Hartnett and John Frederick Peto.

"My very earliest work is like Hartnett," Erbe said. "In the latter part of '69, I thought to myself, 'You know, I don't want to be a follower of Hartnett. I want to do something that's my own.' "

Erbe developed what he calls "levitational realism," which brings social commentary and abstract composition to trompe l'oeil painting.

"When you look back at the trompe l'oeil painters of the 19th century, they were less interested in social ideas," Erbe said. "It was more an arrangement of objects. Also, in the early trompe l'oeil paintings, the objects usually related. Books on a shelf, whatever."

Erbe is commenting on slavery in "Southern Shadows," which shows a meat hook, a switch, rope, a pair of work gloves, balls of cotton, a swatch of burlap and other items.

Erbe, of Union City, N.J., starts each painting with a collage of found or personally constructed objects that he manipulates into a composition, then starts painting.

"Nothing is accidental," he said. "It's carefully composed."

Seltzer, who often paints still-lifes, likes an element of chance in his work.

"A lot of my work grows intuitively," he said. "I don't necessarily start with full-blown concept. One thing suggests another and I'm off and running.

"What I started with in this particular still-life," he said of "Good Fortune," "was the blue jar with the fortune cookies in it. Then I was having some Chinese food, actually, emptying the food into the dish, and suddenly I looked at these containers in a way I've never looked at them before."

As Seltzer thought about the images he had chosen, a bird cage with a bird walking out of an open door became central.

"This bird that's extricating itself from the cage here is really representative of all of us and the various situations we get ourselves into, and how we manage to find, hopefully, a means of exit from the circumstances that bind us and control us and contain us," said Seltzer, of Woodbury, Conn.

Pastels allows Seltzer to discover colors along the way.

"It's a medium that really blends optically," he said. "It's not like paint, which you physically blend the pigments together. Here (in 'Good Fortune') it's an optical blend, the layering of one color over another creates a third, fourth, fifth color. It's really a matter of experimentation, which is always exciting."

"Good Fortune" won the gold medal at last year's Pastel Society of America show.

The Midyear runs through Aug. 18. Information: (330) 743-1711 and www.butlerart.com

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Joe Pinchot at

jpinchot@sharon-herald.com