Alluring Waterborne Decisions
By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: Bits and Pieces, paintings by Nancy
Michel, Nancy Stewart-Matin, Lynn Weinstein, Pam LaRocco, Judi Longacre, Gail
Wetherell-Sack (mixed media assemblages), Peter Castillo, and Suni / in The
Loft, upstairs at 2ND APRIL GALERIE, 324 Cleveland Ave. NW, downtown
Canton, THROUGH AUGUST 1 www.secondapril.org
I was tempted to
title this entry “My Partial Summer’s Reading and Listening List.” Hopefully
you’ll see what I mean as you read (and listen?) on.
Recently a printmaking
friend (Bill) reminded me (via a lengthy email) of the significance of scale in
the work of the Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, whose legacy includes
the colossal presidents’ heads on Mt. Rushmore. Without getting into the whole
context of the email (note to Bill: you might consider authoring a blog), one
of the take-aways has been a deeper consideration of any artwork’s scale in
relation to its content and meaning.
Tangential as it
might seem, this consideration brings me to the notable popularity of
watercolor painting as I’ve seen it manifest for many years in these parts.
Canton a Watercolor Mecca? Possibly. In any case, what usually occurs to me when
looking at even the best locally exhibited watercolors is their consistently
small-to-modest scale: pristinely framed, consumer-friendly, and suitable for
displaying in designer-savvy domestic interiors. But please don’t take this as
a categorical disparagement of either the practice or the form.
Monumental physical
dimensions in a painted canvas, for example, can be useful in elevating the
presumed importance of its underlying idea. The largeness of many Modernist and
Postmodernist abstract paintings comes to mind here, and how they can still
impress us with, and immerse us in a unique visual language that speaks of things we deem somehow “larger than life.”
That said,
small-scale paintings (those we measure in inches, not feet) can be equally
potent despite their size. I think those
that are the most finely executed (and there are several remarkable watercolor
examples in this exhibit) are intimate, experiential objects in same way that
some books are. Books. Remember those? Hundreds of small sheets of printed paper bound together so you can hold them
all at once in your hand? Both require the author/painter to arrange chosen
compositional elements into an organized structure or theme of one kind or
another. While many literary works are essentially evidence (symbolic journals?)
of an author’s decisions on how best to evoke an immersive sensory experience
in the reader, by extension you might think of some small paintings as writing
with line, color, and shape with the same intentions and results.
Judi Longacre’s
sharply drawn and spectacular Lavalanche depicts
an exotic forest invaded by a river of rainbow-colored lava. You can almost
feel the heat, and sense the motion of the flow, signaled by its diagonal
placement across the center of the picture plane amid the rhythmic swaying of
vibrant green bamboo shafts. Hung next to this piece, both Lynn Weinstein’s
liquid and playful Pigs and Pears, and Lemons
and a Lime, display a similarly elegant, unifying balance of hot and cool
hues.
The richly toned
background of Nancy Stewart-Matin’s Midnight
in the Garden is dark yet neither brooding nor too eerie. Looming (and
blooming) before us is a loosely rendered flowering tree. A mystical light
gently illuminates its diaphanous form, as if glowing from within. Fluid passages
of color seem to shimmer, aided by the wispy white lines that trace the
contours of blossoms.
The wrinkled-looking organic shapes that hover
over the background in Nancy Michel’s Over
the Edge are actually very low-relief painted cutouts, and are a bit more
challenging to name. While the artist told me what the shapes were modelled
after, I’m opting not to share it here, if only because I think there’s some
magic in appreciating the ambiguity of the work. Suffice to say that the shapes
(are they coming together or flying apart?) break the periphery of the picture
plane and creep into the surrounding black matte. That blackness is in turn
picked up by the serpentine line - a cut-out appliqué - placed atop the picture plane while
simultaneously seeming to be behind
it. It’s all an utterly intriguing playtime with figure-ground dynamics.
In “reading” these
paintings we necessarily engage the terminology of applied principles in
effective visual composition: unity, symmetry/asymmetry, balance, variety,
texture, pattern, rhythm. To behold these principles (these decisions) in
action, whether wholly or in part (and beyond any specificity of pictorial
content), is to embrace the sheer pleasure of discovery – the essence of “an
aesthetic experience.” And interestingly, this vocabulary that we apply to
assessing the efficacy or beauty of a visual work is largely the same as when
we assess a musical composition.
These painters are,
then, accomplished orchestrators. As such, their paintings are beautiful music
to my eyes.
PHOTOS (from top):
Lavalanche, by Judi Longacre; Pigs and Pears, and Lemons and a Lime, by Lynn Weinstein; Midnight in the Garden, by Nancy Stewart-Matin; Snacking After Swimming by Nancy Michel;
Over the Edge by Nancy Michel
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