"Sea Folds" by Christina Parrett Brinkman

Through October 13

Ock Hee's Gallery

2 Lehigh St, Honeoye Falls

624-4730

Susan Ferrari Rowley

September 14-October 23

Renaissance Art Gallery

74 St Paul St.

423-8235, rochesterrenaissanceartgallery.com

Christina Parrett Brinkman and Susan Ferrari Rowley have never met, but they are art twins. Here are their stories.

Brinkman is a reserved pixie of a woman who grew up in the Midwest, married young, and needed to earn money while taking care of her handicapped baby. On a whim, she took an adult education painting class. She had talent. Her paintings won awards and, more importantly, sold to an appreciative audience. She thought it was magic.

Brinkman is a right brain/left brain equal opportunity gal. She discovered printmaking and produced images that were simple, colorful, highly graphic, affordable, and popular. Hers became a 50/50 proposition: half art creation and half business acumen. In 1984, she formed Parrett Paper, a company that published and marketed die-cut cards to customers that included the Museum of Modern Art and high-end stationary stores worldwide.

The success of the business was stunning. Within five years, nearly a dozen women worked for Parrett Paper. Production moved from her at-home studio to its own building, among the first to be renovated in the High Falls District.

Life is never neatly compartmentalized. Brinkman's art career choices had been based on economic needs. Those pressures became obsolete. She sold Parrett Paper. It was time for her to stop awhile.

Brinkman returned to painting, a means of limbering up creative muscles. She taught herself woodworking and tried both bronze and glass casting. Four years ago she taught herself the fundamentals of ceramics, installed a kiln, and began exploring the properties of porcelain. The result of that exploration is her debut one-woman installation now on view at Ock Hee's Gallery in Honeoye Falls, a roomful of graceful organic forms, none taller than 10 inches, that echoes quiet, Japanese minimalism - the colors of raked gravel, the science of perfectly placed objects.

Susan Ferrari Rowley enters a room at full throttle. She's a compact ball of energy. Within seconds of meeting her, it becomes obvious that her intellect is working at warp speed and her words hurry to catch up. Both her Italian heritage and Long Island accent contribute to the stew and spew.

Rowley was an artist nearly from birth. Everybody said so. She reveled in testing and trying out tools in her father's workshop. Her heritage is rich in crafts and she acknowledges that impact on her work.

She was an art major at the University of Buffalo, married her college sweetheart, who, after graduation, promptly went into military service. Rowley followed and started graduate school at the University of Arizona. That's where her self-image shifted from fiber artist to sculptor. Later, she finished MFA requirements at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Visiting Rowley requires a trip to the country. A gravel driveway points to the two-story gray shingled house that she and her husband built four years ago. It sits in the middle of flat fields gone to chest-high native grasses. A second building, the garage/barn/studio, sits at a right angle to the main structure. Both are straightforward shapes with simple peaked roofs. Only the trim detail and size and shapes of windows suggest that this is no ordinary colonial.

Step inside and you are immersed in an environment flooded with light where pure space - no unnecessary "stuff" - reigns. Careful planning has gone into the smallest detail, and because there is so little distraction, every detail shows. It is freeing and weightless and reveals a lot about Rowley's art.

Rowley's sculpture is minimal. It is spare and architectural, constructed of stock tubular aluminum skinned over with translucent poly fiber. It defies any attempt at metaphor or narrative. Last winter, nine pieces were exhibited in her solo show at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York City. Now, they are installed at the Renaissance Gallery.

These two mature women have spent lifetimes working through stages of art development by pushing edges. Both have invented processes when other options were not available and thrived in their explorations. Both are obsessed with detail and control. With these exhibits, they show us the elegant results of decades of experience.