'Come as you are' party or potluck? Here's what members exhibits offer for art fans.

Just a few weeks ago, I reviewed an exhibition of artist members’ work at the New Bedford Art Museum. I noted that without the benefit of a singular discipline or a unifying motif, and exhibited as a group only as a result of their common membership, it was a bit like a potluck dinner.

And as I said then, at an unthemed members show as at a potluck dinner, everyone will find something that they like and an offering of something they’d rather not indulge in. I stand by that assessment, generally speaking, but after visiting the Winter Members’ Show at the Marion Art Center, I’d like to offer a perhaps better analogy to describe such an exhibition.

It’s like a “come as you are” party. Now bear with me on this one.

Granted, I’ve never actually attended such an event but I’ve always been intrigued by the idea. Most people know how it’s supposed to work: the phone rings and someone says “we’re having a party right now, come over right now…just as you are.”

For a potential guest, that might mean heading over without combing one’s hair, or shaving one’s face or legs, or wearing nothing but pajamas or sweaty gym clothes, or straight from the job at the fish processing plant, or with a towel wrapped around oneself, fresh from the shower.

So how is that like an unthemed member’s show? Anything goes. If an artist wants to participate in a landscape show (and the curator is doing their job correctly), they don’t bring a still life. Likewise no one wants a painting of a sailboat in an exhibition of nudes. No sculpture needed at a photography exhibit.

For a member’s show, there is no need to be anything but one’s self. Come as you are. Everything is good. And like the “come as you party” — you got the invitation.

The Winter Members’ Show at the MAC exemplifies my admittedly elastic analogy. With several dozen artists exhibiting and presenting work in a variety of disciplines including painting (oil, acrylic, watercolor), drawing, photography, glassworks, fabric art and more, and with styles ranging from the hyper-real to the non-objective, and subject matter focused on portraiture, landscapes, still lifes, the nude, to name but a few, the show defies simple categorization.

Watercolorist Jay Ryan exhibits two small-scale paintings that are a testament to his mastery of a notoriously difficult medium. His “Beach Path” is a handsome and charming landscape arrangement of foliage and an upside-down rowboat, with a vivid deep blue sea in the distance, likely painted near his home on Sconticut Neck in Fairhaven.

Ryan’s other watercolor is “Burgers and Fireflies” is a portrait of a young towheaded boy, likely a grandson or nephew, holding a jar of luminous insects. Much of the surface of the painting surrounding the child is nought but a series of somewhat translucent blocks of color, and as seemingly incongruent as that might sound, it works perfectly.

Deborah Macy displays two large oil paintings, embellished with gold leaf. Both of the paintings — “A Young Magdalene '' and “Sage and Rose” — are portraits of young women, crafted in her trademark manner which employs bold lush colors and a devotion to patterns, be ithey on background wallpaper or the garb on the women. Macy leans heavy and unapologetically into the quixotic, so much so that either one could grace the cover of a romance novel.

A highlight of the exhibition is Butch McCarthy’s reductionist “Big Pink,” a deceptively simple landscape. With but a large band of very light gray across the upper half of the painting indicating sky and a deeper charcoal hue below, working as either land or a body of water, it could almost be taken for an entirely abstract study. But the ”Big Pink” itself is clearly a house where the two grays meet, a kiss between the two, and it ultimately defines the piece.

Jenn Alexander shows two small acrylic paintings — one of a snail, the other of a fiddler crab — that one might initially think were done by a child. They exist somewhere in between “”The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Spongebob Squarepants.” The punny titles are, respectively, “Shelly” and “Fiddler on the Loose.”

Other works of note: Charles Stockbridge’s impressionist-like oil landscapes, Anthi Frangiadis’s charcoal female nudes, Jill Law’s colorful full-bodied non-objective painting called “Labyrinthine,” and Alice Shire’s “Giverny #2,” a bold boogie-woogie abstracted cityscape.

Check out the exhibition. And please…come as you are.

The Winter Members’ Show is at the Marion Art Center, 80 Pleasant St., Marion until Feb. 11.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Members exhibit at Marion Art Center on display through Feb. 11