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by Vanessa Conte
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The defined image of a landscape we once knew blurs at the edges and distorts over time. The rolling hills of summers past become greener or more faded, and the boisterous city block from our childhood becomes tamer or more daunting the more we recall it from our memory. The artists in this month's exhibition compose landscapes that exist somewhere on the fringe of our recollections, where a tree can be a bird, or an eye can be an ocean.
Featuring work by Catherine Ramey, Dorothy Stewart and Mitchell Rosenzweig.
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Catherine Ramey
The process of creating the work itself is what holds most significance for Catherine Ramey. Ramey's process is not predetermined; rather it is an emotional and spiritual consideration of movement, mortality and rebirth. Ramey builds her compositions with layers of oil paint or gouache until the image dissolves into abstraction. While she is painting, the artist repeats a phrase in her head that she will meditate on. These groups of words vary from simple to complex, such as "field light" or "resolves in shifting containment."
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Fecundity #17 (2000)
Catherine Ramey |
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Ramey's Fecundity Series best illustrates her gradual method of painting, and reinforces the meaning of her imagery. Each painting is a portrayal of flowers from her fruitful garden in upstate New York. This organic subject suits the title of the series, Fecundity, which means intellectual and physical fertility. The clarity of the flowers dissipates as the artist drifts into her thoughts, and the work becomes rich with paint. "I start with a form, but the form is no more or less important than the feeling that surrounds it and the deeper, more enduring intangible, that cradles that feeling."
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Fecundity Series (1998)
Catherine Ramey |
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Ramey's landscapes are not ruminations on a physical place, but metaphorical tableaus of her memory. They are recordings of her creative process, composed from "layers and layers of maneuvers, one gesture colliding with another until their interactions make something worthwhile."
Sign the guestbook of Catherine Ramey. |
Convergence #2 (2000)
Catherine Ramey |
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Dorothy Stewart
Dorothy Stewart's brilliantly colored large-scale abstract paintings are appealing for their masterful compositions and ambiguity. Each work is a depiction of nothing specific-until the viewer begins to identify shapes, like a goblet, a tree, a figure or a bird.
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Untitled (1998-9)
Dorothy Stewart |
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"It's all to do with relationships," says Stewart, who prefers interpretation of an image after it is made. The relationships she refers to are those within the artwork itself, and those between the viewer and the artwork. Stewart considers her works to be either "interiors" or "exteriors," exterior usually referring to a landscape of sorts, one that unfolds from within the picture, such as in Untitled. Convincing as a landscape because of its sunny palette of greens, yellows, and reds, the image holds no recognizable pictorial elements such as a horizon, or the illusion of perspective. The artist's theory is that her colors will entice the viewer to make visual identifications, rendering literal illustration unnecessary.
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Orange (1989)
Dorothy Stewart |
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"Today, we are so attuned to abstract art that we are geared to looking not for meaning in the recognizable, but to reading feeling and then making associations with what the abstract artist has set down."
Stewart believes that her audience will welcome the freedom to interpret her work, and let their own visual references take over.
Sign the guestbook of Dorothy Stewart. |
Illz (1997)
Dorothy Stewart |
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Mitchell Rosenzweig
Mitchell Rosenzweig approaches his human-scale canvases with a formal eye, reducing familiar scenes to their essential forms and colors in order to render a vague recollection of a place. In White Poppy Field, layers of small, bright white strokes are built up in the lower half of the composition beneath wider areas of green and blue, to imply blooming foliage and a clear sky. Many of the paintings range between four and six feet in width to create a strong physical relationship between the viewer and the landscape. The large green horizontal area of paint in the middle of the artwork translates as a horizon because of its orientation on the picture plane and its placement at eye level.
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White Poppy Field (2000)
Mitchell Rosenzweig |
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The heavily worked surfaces of Rosenzweig's artworks are covered with thick layers of oil paint. Thinner areas show through to give the impression of depth, exemplified by the darkest central part of Red Poppy Field. This shadowed patch recedes into the background to create perspective, while the splotches of bright reds and blues flatten the foreground to maintain an abstract arrangement of the space. The eyes of the viewer go back and forth between the illusion of the flower field, and the formal abstract composition.
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Red Poppy Field (2000)
Mitchell Rosenzweig |
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Rosenzweig skillfully uses the selective nature of his memory and those of his viewers to bridge the gaps between abstraction and figuration. Each dense layer in his paintings is rendered less clearly with each pass, until the final surface is a faint suggestion of where he has been.
Sign the guestbook of Mitchell Rosenzweig.
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Summer Jazz (2000)
Mitchell Rosenzweig | |
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