After only a year as the Stranger’s visual art critic, Nate Lippens will be leaving the job at the end of this month.

For fans of Lippens like me, this news – coming at a time when Seattle’s visual art environment is as healthy and diverse as anyone can remember – was a major disappointment.

A writer for the Seattle alternative weekly since 2001, Lippens was taken off his full-time music beat last summer to replace Emily Hall, who had decided to leave for New York. Without any background writing about visual art, he at first found many in the local art community dismissive of his credentials and skeptical of his judgment. Lippens wisely chose to confront their reservations head-on: he wrote a confident, humorous account of the situation on the pages of the Stranger that revealed his abilities as a critic and -- more importantly -- as a writer.

Unlike Hall and her predecessor Eric Frederickson, each of whom took time to develop their voice and evolve into accomplished art critics; Lippens arrived on the job with a more-or-less fully-realized sensibility.

While there has been a historical tendency for writers at the Stranger to show off their knowledge of a particular topic (no matter how limited it may be) or fill their columns with personal anecdotes (regardless of how inconsequential they are), Lippens never sought to upstage his subject. This is particularly noteworthy when you consider how well-read and well-informed he is about contemporary art, letters, music, film, and popular culture; all of which he covered for the publication at one time or another.

Nearly every week Lippens demonstrated an intuitive understanding of the complex works of art he chose to review. At his best – which seemed to be much of this past spring and summer -- his writing managed to do more than describe significance; it captured the tone, and sometimes even the underlying rhythm and melody, of the work in question.

On a personal note, I will miss seeing him at the museum press previews we attended. His presence at these events seemed to delight curators and put fellow critics at ease, establishing a kind of professional camaraderie among this group I had never experienced before.

While his departure will be a loss for the Stranger and for Seattle’s art scene, it may prove to be boon for Lippens himself. During a recent lunch together he spoke of a looming, incomplete novel that will now become the subject of his attention. For those of us who have looked forward to reading his reviews each week, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that we may someday pick it up at our local bookstore.

In the meantime, I suspect we may be reading his work again -- if occasionally -- in the Stranger or elsewhere.

A classic theme of European Baroque art is the Assumption of the Virgin, compositions where a beaming Mary is carried up to Heaven in vast altarpieces filled with movement, lush detail, and a sensation of energy and excitement. A swirl of clouds, angels, onlookers, and musical celebrants usually surrounds the main event, while the whole enterprise is prevented from spinning off into chaos by an elaborate underlying structure.

Assumption painting and sculpture has fallen on hard times in recent years - as has the general reputation of the Baroque - but there’s something that brings both to mind in the giant white extravaganza by Sara Sze now permanently in place as the centerpiece of Seattle’s McCaw Hall. The genius of Ms. Sze, now officially enshrined as one of the leading young artists of her generation, is her ability to assemble vast arrays of unlikely materials into strangely compelling works, works in which light-hearted whimsy and conceptual sophistication vie for supremacy, and the spirit of the Baroque can be said to live on.

There is no shortage of both whimsy and sophistication in the current work. The piece is essentially a sort of giant vortex of smaller, mostly metallic pieces, all spiraling upwards from a tightly packed funnel close to the floor, widening outwards as it ascends, and finally exploding into sort of an epiphany as it approaches the ceiling, where the work widens out into huge metallic loops, and artistically-bent hardware store stepladders dance their way to heaven.

Most of the sculpture is constructed out of an elaborate white aluminum lattice, made up of thousands of small welded horizontal and vertical strips and suggesting, in the current context, the elements of a gigantic musical staff. If this dominating skeletal framework is staff, what amounts to musical notes are thousands of brightly colored, everyday objects which populate the skeleton in carefully arranged groupings. None of these elements occurs just once, but can be followed as they reappear like musical motifs throughout the piece.

Take the alligator clips, for example. Starting from the very bottom of the sculpture, just above the ground floor, orange clamps and clips of various sizes grip onto the sculpture at nearly every level, their bright plastic color visible throughout the white framework, like markers allowing us to follow the twists and turns of the piece. Besides providing some zippy color, these clamps both celebrate and mock their own functionality. At times they really do serve an important structural role, as when several of them fasten thin horizontal wires to the larger framework, wires which balance a blue plastic cup at one end and a single artificial flower at the other. More frequently the clips serve no function at all, latched onto the various reaches of the sculpture as though hanging on for dear life, like someone attempting to grab hold of a cloud.

There is a long list of similar store-bought elements which populate the sculpture, used for both metaphoric and compositional effect. Large tape measures hang downwards, fully extended, like stalagmites; blue water bottles specially selected by the artist range upwards, helpfully accompanied by yellow and blue plastic drinking cups. Ascending rows of carpenter’s levels provide a horizontal counterpoint to the inherent instability and verticality of the work, while plastic ferns, flowers, and painted branches are the only literal referents to the natural world – often attached to the sculpture by the intermediary of the ever-present yellow clips. Ferns and plastic cups sit inside, for some reason, the otherwise empty blue birdcages, and here and there hundreds of colored pushpins rest in metal pans, perhaps awaiting some more particular use at a later stage of the work’s evolution – and if any artwork threatens to keep evolving, it would be this one.

When the biblical Jacob had his celestial vision, it famously involved ladders. Here ladders and stairways, often in miniature, do their bit to lead our eye relentlessly upwards, and it is significant that the entire work begins with a ladder at its lowest reaches, and ends with a ladder at its highest point. In the 35 feet in-between, various other ladders and stairs twist, bend, and collide. Who said ascensions were simple? Although other Sze works have included similar elements, one is here reminded of the backstage ladders that are key tools in the art of the theatre, as well as serving the Opera technicians who built and hung the current piece.

An important part of the commission was the creation of an artwork that would stand up to repeated viewings. This the artist has clearly done, nearly to a fault. As demonstrated by her earlier work, Sze is comfortable working with huge numbers of individual elements. In the current installation, with so many possible vantage points as one mounts the stairs, or circulates through the surrounding lobby, there are nearly unlimited opportunities to puzzle over and discover the inspired, repetitive minutia that is the work’s strongest feature.

In fact, the sculpture works best when viewed close-up, when we can be swept up in its internal world. From a distance, and particularly when viewed against the lobby’s outer glass wall, the mostly white work lacks clear materiality, failing to hold up against its light surroundings, undermining its ability to truly anchor the surrounding space, or be experienced and enjoyed as a monumental sculptural form. Other Sze works have used color as a more dominant element - I wish that was the case here.

In choosing Sara Sze to animate the pleasant, but rather bland space of the McCaw lobby, the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs and its assembled experts made an inspired choice – someone whose work is as eccentric, bristling, complicated, and eventful as the surrounding space is smooth, tasteful, and predictable. It is certainly a major, and perhaps even a great piece, and immediately joins the front ranks of public artworks in this still very evolving young city. Its musical, uplifting theme and Baroque sensibility is completely appropriate for the theatre it will now personify.

I spent some very rewarding time in Gallery 110 this afternoon, looking at work by Pam Berglundh and Elizabeth Halfacre. Berglundh apparently talked her friends into posing for her in their underwear. There’s a ruthless quality to the way she digs in to emphasize every roll over the pantyline, but the ruthlessness seems directed more at the viewer (“There it is. Deal with it.”) than at the subjects, who calmly look you in the eye.

The work is very reminiscent of Alice Neel, especially in the 1940s and '50s, when her palette was heavier and she filled the canvas. Berglundh’s painting is very much about drawing, as was Neel’s. And she even has a very pregnant woman among her subjects. (Neel said “I feel as a subject it’s perfectly legitimate, and people out of false modesty, or being sissies, never showed it, but it’s a basic fact of life.” Patricia Hills, Alice Neel, p.162.)

Halfacre creates images out of collage, and I found her figures quite satisfying. Her Speaking Words of Wisdom (think the Beatles: “Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be”) looks like a Byzantine icon painted by a Cubist. The bald head in Cancer in My Pocket comes from an original drawing and from (I assume) an ancient Greek head. Pictures of Egyptian relief sculpture and floral textiles create form and pattern.

For The County, his current exhibition at the James Harris Gallery, Claude Zervas has created a series of works that lie at the confluence of contemporary mediums, conceptual-based art, and Northwest sensibilities.

Zervas’ subject matter here is the landscape, and he treats the phenomenon in the broad context of Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets: it is less an external, observed reality than it is a manifestation of an internal, subjective state of being. Within its quiet drama, the artist finds a mirror to the self.

A Bellingham native and Seattle resident, Zervas sees his reflection in a familiar, characteristically Northwest setting. But unlike his famous predecessors, who rendered it darkly in oil paint, Zervas realizes this environment coolly with light and projection.

Nooksack, one of the two primary works in the show, is a sculptural model of the Whatcom County river made of thirty-two nine-inch florescent bulbs and hundreds of feet of white-plastic insulated electrical wire set in within the gallery’s black walls and carpet. The current flows through its cords and filaments just as water courses through the river’s channels and sloughs.

In Forest #3, a six-minute video of trees seen from across a clearing, a static image degrades from photographic realism to Cezanne-like geometric representation and ultimately to a gray, monochromatic abstraction. As the transformation begins, the white bark of the birch trees appears to come alive, expanding as they distort the digital canvas.

Both the glow of the string of lights and wire against the dark background and the bright expanding pixels of the birches in foreground of the woods bring to mind – in a curious sort of way -- the white brush-stokes of Mark Tobey. They are artistic manifestations of a life force that emerges from the surrounding darkness, both an action and metaphor of human consciousness.

We see this force again, in a more lighthearted vein, in La Buche, where soft, multicolored, gumdrop-like bulbs pulsate within the knot-holes of coarse cedar bark.