By John Kelly
Thursday, May 10, 2007

Amid the moving sidewalks, rolling suitcases and white courtesy phones of BWI Airport is a shrine to what the miracle of flight is supposed to be like.

Forget stale peanuts, missed connections and lost luggage; flight is meant to be silk scarves and goggles, dogfights and carrier landings. It's the blinding reflection of the sun off the polished skin of a B-25 bomber and the wasp-waisted silhouette of an RAF Spitfire as it soars over France.

It's that combination of power and effortlessness that seems to come to us only in dreams.

For the next four months, 58 works of art selected by the American Society of Aviation Artists will be on display in BWI's International Terminal. They provide a lovely distraction as you wait to walk through a metal detector in your stocking feet.

I was an Air Force brat and my pilot father always had his office adorned with paintings, photographs and sculptures of the planes he flew. Many of the artists at Tuesday's opening reception also have airplanes in their blood.

Steve Anderson's grandfather was a pilot back in the 1920s. When Steve was growing up in California, Stearman biplanes dusted the crops near his house. The BWI exhibit features Steve's painting of two World War I German biplanes flying low over a German U-boat.

"I like action," Steve said. "I like motion. I like movement. I like power. I like engines. . . . When I started painting the picture, I could hear the sea hissing past the hull of the submarine. The planes were still blank canvas. When I started painting the airplanes in, I started hearing the engine sounds."

Aviation art is clearly for anyone who went neeeeeoooooooow! ack-ack-ack-ack! while doodling a fighter jet on the back of a notebook, hot lead erupting from wing-mounted machine guns.

If there's a special challenge that aviation artists face, it's the smug know-it-allness of their audience. Aviation buffs obsess about airplanes right down to the last rivet. Woe be to any artist who dares to take artistic license with a pitot tube or a canopy latch.

A few years back, Steve painted a Marine Corps Corsair shooting down a MiG in Korea, a dramatic real-life scene involving his cousin Jesse Folmar, the only pilot to down a jet from the cockpit of a piston-driven airplane during that war. Steve soon received a letter pointing out that the Corsair never had four 20mm cannons -- it had only six .50-caliber machine guns.

"Well in the Korean War, it did," Steve said. He found a photo in a book -- he has a library's worth in his house -- scanned it and sent it to the guy with a note that read, " Here's the plane. Here's the gun."

"Of course, that settled the argument," Steve said.

New York artist Mimi Stuart said she strives for accuracy in her work, too, even though her style is relatively abstract. Her painting of a P-40 Warhawk, "Dauntless: Lope's Hope," is an explosion of orange and yellow, the canvas burnished with copper, silver and 24-karat gold.

Mimi also does sports paintings and celebrity portraits, including a recent one of Peter Frampton. ("He's such a sweetheart," she said.)

Keith Ferris is the dean of aviation painting. There are two of his huge murals at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. He helped found the aviation artists society 21 years ago, having noticed that there were an awful lot of airplane buffs who didn't know much about art and an awful lot of artists who didn't know much about airplanes.

"The idea was to bring everybody together," he said. Two of his paintings are in the exhibit, including a C-141 cargo jet on the ice in Antarctica, surrounded by penguins. Keith likes to say that he doesn't paint airplanes, he paints flight.

Tumblers of wine in hand, the artists surveyed the paintings, admiring the way they'd captured how light shines through fabric and clouds look before a storm and contrails stitch their way across an endless blue sky.

What is it about flight that inspires us, the artist and the viewer alike?

"It's symbolic of the freedom to leave the earth and soar and to go beyond where you've been," said Mimi.

And with that I went to see if I could find my car in the airport parking garage, that most earthbound of structures.