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Introduction
to Double
Take The genesis of Double Take came from my longtime desire to create and organize an exhibition. The idea hatched during my morning walks up and down Houston's North and South Boulevards, and it became an objective in my sabbatical proposal for the Glassell School of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I wanted the exhibition to focus on comparisons among the paintings, drawings, and sculptures of a group of artist friends whose work I have followed over the years and have found to be beautiful, provocative, sustained, and meaningful. Given the individuality and diversity of the artists, I decided to create a theme-based show broad enough to encompass everyone's way of working. The exhibition would revolve around five pairs of artists dealing with five themes offering two points of view on each theme. The title Double Take and the idea of pairing and comparing emerged spontaneously. The pairs of artists and their themes are: Anstis Lundy and Ellen Berman-Still life: crystalline and cloistered Helen Orman and Lynn Randolph-Portrait/Figure: psychological and metaphorical Honey Harrison and Charlotte Cosgrove-Landscape: mysterious and enigmatic Bobbye Bennett and Pam Johnson-Nature: ecological and botanical Dee Wolff and Sharon Kopriva-Heaven and Hell: revelation and ritual Each of these artists has a distinct and resonant voice.
Anstis Lundy's watercolors are crystal clear visual delights executed with a sensitive technical virtuosity. Her compositions house a mixture of exquisitely etched objects-food, flowers, light bulbs, and containers both ordinary and grand-bathed in veils of soft colored transparencies with subtly manipulated reflections and shadows. Objects are posed and spread across a seemingly invisible surface. A shell, an orange, or a feather is constructed with multiple gradations of color. One recognizable shape dissolves into another, forming an abstract passage. The paper becomes a kind of translucent film acting like a hologram. In it the objects are projected dimensionally, forming a wonderfully nuanced mirage. There are paintings of large single objects: a soft chocolate-covered cherry broken open, oozing sensuality, and a bunch of green grapes emerging as newborns from a chrysalis of clear plastic. A triptych features three enormous slices of bread-plain white, toasted, and burnt-each full of textural nooks and crannies. Bread-symbolizing sustenance, fellowship, and the body of Christ-becomes a trinity of toasts hanging on the whiteness of the paper suspended like spiritual icons. Lundy makes everyday objects awe-inspiring. Her watercolor paintings sing with joy, humor, and well being. They are breathtaking celebrations of beauty. Ellen Berman creates sensuous and elegiac oil paintings of fruits, vegetables, crockery, and plants. These silent objects and their surroundings are built of beautiful modulations of seductive and close-keyed colors melting into the forms, giving them a strong sculptural presence. The saturated yellow surrounding a group of eggs is so intense it bakes their shells to a golden brown. Berman's objects are seen close up and isolated on a colored field. Thrown shadows and angular highlights indicate a ground plane and light source, yet the cloistered backgrounds are ambiguous. There are no cloths or table edges to orient the viewer. Objects feel as if they are tacked to a wall, slipping off a surface, or floating just above the ground. A crack of light between objects can become a point of fascination as can the shape of an echoing shadow. Berman hones each object to perfection-leathery eggplants, figs morphing into sea anemones, bowls becoming glistening swimming pools, polished plums. Elegant objects are held captive in a secluded refuge of deep luminous stillness, drawing the viewer into a contemplative solitude. Helen Orman creates solemn and riveting portraits of herself, her family and friends, and admired writers. The portraits transcend the photographs on which they are based. The heads are realistically drawn in great detail, hundreds of soft pastel strokes in multiple hues model the face, yet there is something unsettling going on in the drawings. The faces emerge from a rich and deep textural ground from which little creatures appear as clowns and demons, suggesting fears, anxieties, and delights. Twin portraits of two children resemble a stereoptic card with two identical images that only come together in a viewer. The sweetness of the innocent children, their mirrored images, their eyes staring both outward and inward, the cold blue and eerie green colorations, and the shifting phantoms that haunt them and their surroundings make the double portraits disturbing and mesmerizing. The collage drawing "Pain gone when woke" depicts a young woman with a slight smile. The background is composed of text from her diary. A life's story surrounds this lovely and delicate ashen face, a face marked with promise and disappointment. The lack of color and the beautiful blending of facial features into the collaged paper create a supernatural effect. The faces in these portraits are haunting. They loom out of the backgrounds and for a moment we know them, feel for them, cry with them. They materialize, only to fade back into a haze of unrecognition suspended in time as lingering memories. There is an aura of nostalgia and a psychological edge in Orman's drawing. She resurrects souls from the past by meticulous recreation and heightens our awareness of those who are still living. Lynn Randolph devises vivid and hyper-real oil paintings dealing with contemporary issues and the mysteries of existence. Figures of family and friends become enmeshed in personal inquiries, cultural dilemmas, political events, social injustices, and technology out of control. Backgrounds are sharply articulated, forming mountainous landscapes, cityscapes and laboratories, wetlands and seas, cyberspace and cosmic skies. Images knife through blackened grounds to confront the viewer: a woman in a nightgown levitates over a city of gun shots, street fires and shuttle launches; mutant medical mice forage on the chest of a screaming male patient in a hospital. These paintings are complex, often uncomfortable, and challenging to decipher; symbolism and metaphor abound. The triptych Rapt Surrender Liquefying is peaceful but uncertain. It depicts the heads and upper bodies of three women appearing at the bottom of the canvas like apparitions. Nothing detracts from their soft colors and sensual forms; the ground is a dense and dark vacuum. The women’s eyes are closed; they are solitary, looking inward. One head is veiled in a gossamer film, another slips away into a pool of liquid. They are lost in thought, moving freely, seemingly contemplating age-old questions about where we come from, what we are, and where we are going. Randolph’s paintings are well-informed, carefully constructed, and deeply felt. They are works of Renaissance beauty and clarity, intellectually and psychologically profound. Honey Harrison's intimate and finely executed drawings are composed of densely layered surfaces of ink, prismacolor, and gouache. These handsome works blend images of familiar things and abstract passages. Everything that Harrison sees, everything that surrounds her-the Houston house and garden, the Camp Creek cottage nestled in the woods by a lake-finds its way into her drawings. One form gives rise to another in a continuous moving procession of images. There are windows, doorways, walls, and roofs joined by trees, shrubs, rocks, currents of water, and skies. There are weather effects, atmospheres, and times of day. There are objects with particular meaning-a piece of rope, garden gloves, a leaf, a potato, a butterfly. A turtle shell beautifully formed in layers of ink shimmers within a geometric framework of linear and dotted detail, an iconic homage to this once living creature. Stylized forms superimposed on top of or beside one another lie flat on the picture plane yet look three-dimensional. Objects and spaces are given solidarity and depth through layers of colored textures and patterns and changes in value. Every form is infused with inner light, soft, sparkling, or dark and deeply radiant. In the drawing Pine, an ominous dark shadow of an inverted pine tree severs the paper. Branches denuded of needles shoot out of the sides at rhythmic intervals. A pyramidal hill or rooftop woven in tiny pen strokes rises in the distance. A reddish column glows like a chimney stack. Orange earth is interrupted by greenish stones or lichens, their migration held back by the edge of a gray elliptical lake. It is dusk. Harrison’s drawings resemble opulent stage sets. There are borders as in a proscenium arch that keep the drawing contained and the focus inside so the pictorial experience expands inward and not outward. The stage is set with multiple flats of amalgamated images and an array of props, all intricately juxtaposed, forming a stunning kaleidoscopic play. Charlotte Cosgrove creates tiny ink and prismacolor drawings of everyday events, some whimsical and lighthearted, others perilous and grave. These happenings are set in the landscapes of Maine and Texas, or in imaginary places. They relate to emotional states and psychological upheavals, and occasionally make reference to particular twentieth-century art works. Reality exists, but with distortions and inventions. Images of houses, figures, boats, birds, and curious objects are found amidst mountains, forests, lakes, and gardens, drawn in minute detail with textural intricacy. The house is a recurring image. Some houses, as well as the landscapes, are peaceful, even amusing, but most are in crisis, or threatened, or threatening. When figures are included they are often winged or have their arms outstretched in alarm. The house in Maine after Munch is set at the edge of the woods and faces a clearing occupied by strange figurative cabanas whose gaping fronts or mouths open outward to a quiet body of water. A ladder hangs over the rocky bank. The bow of a boat enters the river; it seems empty and ghostlike. A large-leafed tree perches on the edge of an island. Colors are subdued-blues, grays, pinks, and greens-except for the blood red of the cabanas and the leaves on the tree. The houses are benign; the landscape is a bit weird and unsettling. These eccentric and personal drawings use childlike imagery to suggest enigmatic narratives. Bobbye Bennett's elegant drawings of biological forms in graphite, soft pastel, and acrylic paint are both subtle and forceful. Exotic trunk-like shapes rise upward on white paper passing through indefinable space. The form is growing and breaking out of its boundaries. The action within the totem comes from a complexity of delicate shapes and marks resembling thistly plants which ignite and spew upward to form a cluster of revolving blossoms or terminals. A puff of smoke or dust cloud is emitted at the top. In Treescape 11 the trunk seems to be birthing or sheltering a kind of flayed bird whose deep chest cavity reveals a transparency of tissues, tendons, nerves, bone slivers, and minute organs. The innards of Treescape III are whirling, ready to combust. Small intricate twists and streaks of color and wisps of graphite form a teaming organic mass of abstract beauty. The outer edges sprout thin sinuous sculptural twigs. These monumental and perplexing organisms seem to be in the process of becoming. They are striking and unusual forms sensitively and intuitively drawn, visually fascinating and full of wonder. Bennett's Thailand collage paintings incorporate sharp photographic images of elephants swallowed up in seas, fires, and forests of vibrant colors. Bennett lived in Singapore for two years and was deeply moved by the presence of these huge earthbound animals. She saw them used for logging, entertainment, and riding. She saw their homelands disappearing. The collage paintings are dramatic in subject matter and intense with color. An elephant crashes through tall plants and trees in environmental panic. An elephant rests on a flaming sacrificial pyre. An elephant in stately profile is severed from his trunk which has morphed into an ivory tusk. In the painful beauty of these works, Bennett honors this majestic creature. Pam Johnson makes provocative and tough pastel and charcoal drawings and engaging balsa wood sculptures of enlarged botanical forms. Leaves, flowers, stems, buds, bulbs, and pods become vigorous organic shapes with strongly sexual overtones. In the black and white drawings, these intriguing plant forms move about quietly, secretively, maneuvering in a dark and beautiful underground space. Sprouts or tentacles wind around, blindly pushing or pulling a bulb or seed. In the color drawings, clamoring leaves and stems, heavily outlined in assertive colors, crowd the surface of the paper and become confrontational. The balsa wood Sculptures, painstakingly carved, stained or painted, have a more whimsical nature. There are womb-like shapes, in singles and pairs, loaded with seeds; a dangling cluster of elegant blue leaves; and a comical group of hanging bean pods painted in a jaunty colored pattern. Strange Cluster IV is a more formal sculpture. Three interactive forms of raw sanded wood hang from long vines. Each is a kind of chameleon, changing its form from plant to personage, gourd to torso, male to female. It hangs with strength and dignity, gently turning in mid-air. These ever-evolving and seductive botanicals have an arresting physicality and mysterious presence. Dee Wolff’s exquisite gouache and ink drawings are executed with an intense spiritual passion; they have a magnetic attraction drawing the eye and mind into their depths. The viewer is seduced by vibrant and saturated colors in a highly energized spatial field loaded with imagery. Each object is charged and charts its own course through invented space uniting land, sea, and sky; night and day; all seasons; heaven and the underworld. Wolff's Button Box Memories are meditations on death. These ink drawings tell of a journey, a passage from one state to another, an ongoing passage from body to spirit. The space, a yellowing, ghost-like ground, reveals vehicles and markers scattered across some vast territory. The space is nameless, open, endless, and felt. Revered symbols are diagrammed throughout-bound bodies drift; boats and ships sail on measured voyages; fish empty into space, free of the catch. Ladders connecting earth and the heavens ascend, some rigid for climbing, some arched to form a track or bridge. Safety nets are spread out for protection. Beacons transmit signals, and towering guideposts mark the way. This is a lonely trip for both the dead soul and those left behind. Wolff's drawings take the viewer on a meditative journey following life's varied pathways, wandering through rich tapestries of color, or navigating around pictorial charts and maps full of lost and found souls and guiding spirits. Sharon Kopriva's spellbinding mummified creatures are formed of cloth, bone, paper, objects, paint, and glue. The figures are so well crafted that they come to life in their shrines and tableaus. Viewing them is like stumbling upon relics from the past in a catacomb or some remote part of a cathedral, monastery, or nunnery. These souls stranded in time and space, half dead, half alive, are engulfed by religious conditioning and circumstance. The small intimate paintings and reliquaries with their dust encrusted niches and dried flowers contain cardinals and bishops, crumpled bodies, and skeletons of sinners in eerie settings, musty decaying gardens and foreboding landscapes. The sculptural figures are macabre, dried out, and deteriorating. His Excellency is old and emaciated. The expression on his face is one of pious authority, yet he looks deflated and empty. His hollow body is held together by vestments, a weighty cross, and a staff resembling a twisted horn. There is nothing there of spiritual substance, only the facade of ceremonial attire. In Excelsis Deo nuns sing exuberantly, protruding from a piano body which substitutes for a choir stall. Their voices boisterous and booming flatten the head of the pianist, whose gaze is aimed upward to heaven and whose body is awkwardly positioned on a stool. This is a rowdy sculpture, joyous and good humored. in Soul Tickler, a docile and pallid looking priest sits at the upright piano from heaven and hell, his bony hand upon a keyboard made of tiny paper figures. Below him, on the piano bottom, blackened skulls and skeletal figures squirm in a turbulent inferno. Above the keyboard in the hollowed out front of the piano is a sky blue sanctuary of soaring skeletons swathed in boat-like forms, zooming in and out of space. Kopriva's arresting figures with their robes and props in pulpits, booths, and chairs swing from raucous humor to a grave seriousness-suggestive of a lethal overdose of religion. These ancient beings become metaphors for physical and spiritual decay but the possibility for rebirth exists and is present in the ten foot boat reliefs. With crossed hands and bow-like crosses, corpses strapped into tall sculls are launched upright beginning the long voyage to salvation and the afterlife.
In the process of organizing this exhibition, in talking with the artists and seeing their work, it became dear that there were more than five pairings or double takes. The inner connections ran deep, were revealing, and expanded the whole idea of the show. The work represented in this exhibition is not static; it is ongoing, in process, and metamorphosing in an intensely personal way. I have the utmost regard for and pay tribute to my artist friends for staying the art course, for their dedication to a volatile and challenging field with both its rewards and its rejections, and for their own personal accomplishments amidst joys and sorrows. Anstis Lundy, Ellen Berman, Helen Orman, Lynn Randolph, Honey Harrison, Bobbye Bennett, Pam Johnson, Dee Wolff, and Sharon Kopriva continue to grow and fine tune their already elegant techniques. They seek life and rejuvenation in the seen and unseen and regard the creative act as a thing of great beauty and spiritual comfort. |