Intimate Encounters
By Tom Wachunas
“All art constantly aspires towards the
condition of music.” –English critic Walter Pater, 1873
EXHIBITS: Recent
paintings by Marti Jones Dixon at Journey
Art Gallery, 431 4th Street (downtown Canton) THROUGH SEPT. 30; ALSO, Scenes From Hitchcock, at Julz by Alan
Rodriguez, 220 Market Ave. N (downtown Canton), THROUGH OCT. 31
At one point
during my drive home from Journey Art Gallery after viewing these recent oil
paintings by Marti Jones Dixon, the lovely Barcarolle from Offenbach’s opera,
“Tales of Hoffman,” came on the radio. It was one of those uncanny moments when
music absolutely clarified and magnified a visual encounter.
Barcarolles were originally musical expressions
based on the lilting, slow rhythms of folk melodies sung by Venetian
gondoliers. And suddenly a picture coalesced in my mind of Marti Dixon gently –
but oh so purposefully - laying down paint on a canvas, as if rowing through a
scene, stroke by stroke.
The images
themselves can best be described as contemporary “genre art” – scenes of
everyday life. [Note: the exhibit at Julz,
which I’m not reviewing in this post, features scenes from Alfred Hitchcock films wherein Hitchcock
inserted himself.] But this isn’t to denigrate them as being commonplace or
unremarkable. For that, all we need do
is surf digital social media to look at myriad manifestations of photographic
mediocrity.
So yes, Dixon’s oil
paintings are derived from photos, and their small scale enhances their casual,
snapshot immediacy. Viewing them isn’t too unlike browsing through the artist’s
personal photo album, or someone’s Facebook page. After that, though, what
separates them from being ordinary depictions of the familiar is Dixon’s
consummate skill in constructing, or orchestrating various elements that
transform them into elegantly painted
realities – parallel to observable reality, yet separate and unique.
Here is an
intimate world, true to itself. Dixon models her figures and objects not with
the illusionistic drama of chiaroscuro, or by dazzling us with hyper-realist
linear details, but with planes of color subtly modulated with distinct brush
marks. The gestural confidence and fluidity of those markings at times recalls
a Cezannesque expressivity, though perhaps not quite so muscular in nature.
Paired with her translation of diffused light, which we might call warm or
optimistic, most of these scenes are imbued with a tangible quietude and
serenity.
Meanwhile, there’s
just the right touch of narrative and compositional mystique in some of them.
We don’t directly know the people depicted, yet somehow feel invited to
eavesdrop, or enter the space they occupy. Bally
Maloe House is a fascinating, unified fusion of rectilinear and curvilinear
pictorial space. While the central room in the image recedes inward to another
room’s doorway, its light-colored ceiling seems to flare outward and forward on
the top left edge of the painting to a darkened, arched point, playfully
directing our attention to both the staircase leading up, and outward, beyond the picture plane. What room might we encounter
then? Could it be the lovely chamber where the man and woman are seated at the
table in Tea?
Dixon’s relaxed
technique allows each brush stroke, each individually described shape, to have
a character all its own - like a musician’s solo passages beautifully
integrated with the structured, lyrical rhythms of the full orchestra. Shhh.
Can you hear the harmonies?
PHOTOS (from top):
Edie
Coming In; Bally Maloe House; Tea; Green Room
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