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Yeager's layered paintings |
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Sydney Yeager is a great painter. Why? She's in love with paint. Not just the act of painting, but the physical properties of oil paint, with all its sumptuousness, dexterity and drama. Yeager loves the intensity of the color, the way paint catches, reflects or holds the light; the way it can gather in rich textures and organic forms on the canvas; and the way paint can capture the imprint and movement of the brush. All that is abundantly clear in "Little Mysteries," the midcareer retrospective of the long-favored Austin artist organized by the Galveston Arts Center and now making its local stop at Arthouse. It's clear that Yeager is an artist who is firmly set on an independent trajectory. She's not an artistic rebel; the native Texan and mother of two grown daughters just travels her own path. Yeager's is a subtle abstract language made eloquent and complex by the manner in which she paints. She builds her finished works by meticulously painting layer upon layer, each one sometimes disrupting and sometimes complementing the last. It's an approach she has refined over her career; in the current exhibit, it's easy to see how this technique has evolved. In her paintings from the early '90s -- works like "Untitled (night torso with scissors and lily)" and "Untitled (head with bowls)" -- the layering is more evident, the symbols more recognizable. Heads, torsos, vessels, calligraphic scribbles, natural forms and animals float in and out of textured, multicolored pictorial spaces that resemble palimpsests. Yet Yeager isn't handing us a script of specific visual metaphors that we must interpret. She's simply offering suggestions and letting us decide the rest. Indeed, it's hard to tell if Yeager's paintings represent a view of things at a small, subatomic level or on a grand, cosmic scale. As Yeager's style develops, the recognizable forms begin to evanesce away as she refines her iconography. There's an elliptical shape that begins to reoccur, sometimes overtly, as in "Mirror," where half a dozen yellow ellipses pop out from a blackish background, and sometimes obliquely, as in "Translocate" where a mass of rounded forms positively wiggle and squirm. And then there are other recent pieces, such as "Asymmetric Disturbance," in which Yeager's signature ellipse has not just shrunk but morphed and then, of course, been relentlessly layered. "Asymmetric Disturbance" almost boogies: Small forms in hues of purple, red and blue crash together in a happy, visually noisy riot. Yeager wants it that way. "I intend to overwhelm the viewer, absorb her in a swarming world, buffet him about, exercise the eye and the mind," Yeager writes in a recent artist's statement. "In some ways the paintings mimic the overstimulation of daily life, and in others, they plunge the viewer into an interior space unknowable except on an imaginary level." Just as her artistic style has taken on a more energetic pitch, so has Yeager's career gained speed. In addition to regular shows at D. Berman Gallery here in Austin, she also exhibits at McMurtrey Gallery in Houston and her work has been collected by the Austin Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of Art and the Tyler Museum of Art. Recently Yeager has sold works through and exhibited at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco. And last year she received a commission from the Austin Fairchild Art Foundation for the joyous, vibrant 6-foot by 15-foot-long triptych "Thermal Expansion" as part of its annual Thanksgiving Image Project (the painting is included in the current exhibition). Next week "Particles of Order," a solo exhibit of Yeager's most recent paintings, opens at D. Berman Gallery. A preview of that new work shows that Yeager continues to ramp up the tension that is central to her work. It's that kind of artistic development that defines a master artist -- one who is never content to stay put. jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699 'Sydney Philen Yeager: Little Mysteries' When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday (Thursday until 9 p.m.); 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday through Jan. 11 Where: Arthouse at the Jones Center, 700 Congress Ave. How much: free Info: 453-5312 'Particles of Order' When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, Dec. 11-Jan. 17 Where: D. Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St. How much: free Info: 477-8877 |
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