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Morgan Taylor: Self-Portrait With TV
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One of the highlights of June, 2004 was the members' show at
Blue Mountain Gallery in Chelsea. "Improvisations on a
Square" displayed to good advantage the rich diversity of
styles and media employed by 36 gallery artists within the
same square format. Materials ranged from Cornelia Kubler
Kavanagh's painted plaster maquette through Linda Smith's
digital print, Constance Gruen's acrylic and newspaper
composition, Ken Ecker's charcoal on canvas, an etching by
Victoria Salzman, a painted collage on silk by Louise
Guerin, to the classic oil on linen of Rose Weinstock. So
varied were the media, imagery, palettes, touches, energies
and linearities employed by the artists that the sameness of
the square disappeared.
Of particular delight in this exhibition were the images,
both abstract and figurative, that expressed their themes
with exquisite subtlety, using formal elements as
correlatives to sensations or emotions, as in "Aeneas Turns
from Dido," by Robert Sievert, in which razor-sharp edges
separate the figures who are "cut off" from each other, and
their dismembered anatomies reinforce the theme of
sundering. Sievert's printmaking skills are in full
evidence in this collograph; his line has the grim
incisiveness of Picasso's line in his Guernica.
Marcia Clark, in "Afternoon #2," casts an atmosphere of
expectancy over a winter landscape. Bluegray shadows hover
over peachcolored snow. The vegetative world seems hushed,
like an audience in a concert hall before a show begins. No
wind blows. Trees in ranked postures seem to be waiting. For
spring? Clark refrains from rendering details in sharp focus
in this poetic oil painting, the better to create a
dreamlike world that quivers at the near edge of the
surreal. Abstract works in this show also communicate with
subtle poetry: Anne Diggory's "Pear Squared" plays chubby
organic forms against the logical, mathematical proportions
of a grid, a nice resolution of opposites rendered with
sensuousness and painterly intelligence.
With brushwork not gratuitously virtuosic but stunning
nonetheless, Morgan Taylor, in "Self-Portrait with T.V,"
charges an interior scene with psychological tension. Taylor
paints a close up of a young man, backlit by the aquamarine
and salmon-colored flicker of a rectangle that we know is tv
screen from the painting's title, but which could be a
painting hanging on a wall behind the figure, or a window
opened out to a bright flowergarden. The viewer is thrown
into uncertainty. The male figure turns from the rectangle
that frames him and stares out of the picture into the left
distance, seemingly troubled and discomfited by the
restriction of the impinging pictorial space. There is
something funereal in this picture, reminiscent of Edvard
Munch's griefstricken figures in gloomy rooms (the darkly
dressed man even resembles Munch in appearance). Taylor's
avoidance of obvious narrative allows the human drama he
depicts to puzzle the viewer with its mystery. It's not
often that art engages the viewer to participate in the
creation of its meaning, but Taylor's work invites the
viewer to speculate about what the painting's ambiguous
imagery adds up to, a rewarding opportunity to exercise
creative imagination and admire the subtle sensibility of an
accomplished artist.
Helene Manzo's "View of Pescalo" both expresses and resolves
natural paradoxes in painterly terms. Her brushwork in this
landscape is both delicate and rough simultaneously. Ripples
in water are rendered with what appears to be the wood end
of the brush, yet they liquify. The composition rolls but is
stable: cypresses lean out from a cliff like botanical
versions of Easter Island totems; vegetation and rock seem
to be in motion. Everything is the picture is moving or
seems about to move. Land and atmosphere are in process,
dynamic yet not chaotic, full of energy yet peaceful. Manzo
has painted nature's self-regulating force with empathy and
casual brilliance, no easy feat.
In "Landscape," an oil by Marilyn Honigman, the composition
is also dynamically balanced. A horizon rendered with
scumbled paint creates an "edgeless edge" where water meets
the sky. With that magic that some painters perform,
Honigman makes the viewer feel the pressure that the sky,
dark with a thunderhead, exerts on the water below, keeping
it from rising to the top of the picture. Pictorial elements
are arranged with artistic sleight-of-hand to evoke the
tension in the quiet before a storm, a stillness charged
with electricity.
Margaret Leveson, in "Herons on My Mind" achieves the
simultaneity of views of analytical cubism in a
representational manner, by painting the same heron in a
sequence of scenes that comprise one painting. Within the
larger square, four smaller squares painted on unbleached
linen depict the diurnal activities of this reedy-legged
waterfowl -- flying over a dark patch of water, one wing in
light, the other in darkness, or searching for fish at
water's edge, a picture of total alertness, life under seige
in a marsh. Leveson portrays nature with lyricism but
without sentimentality, giving us the predatory nature of
this solitary hunter along with its breathtaking
gracefulness, in a painting that defies the chronological
sequence of time.
Blue Mountain Gallery is comprised of an impressive stable
of artists, as this comprehensive show so richly
demonstrates. One looks forward to seeing their work in more
depth in the upcoming season.
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