The Light of Spring at Spanierman
From Bowden to Foss: A riot of color blasts the off-season doldrums
By Jennifer Landes
Spanierman Gallery
Deborah Black’s “Glade,” in gouache and acrylic on paper, is one of the more representational abstractions on view at Spanierman in East Hampton. |
(4/10/2008) In every winter’s end I’ve spent on the South Fork (six in all), there’s a point when it truly seems like this is the year when spring won’t come, when all of the trees will stay leafless, no flowers will bloom, no robins will return. Even when some of those signs begin appearing, it’s still a long gray gap before true spring appears, usually sometime around summer.
As I write this on a chilly Sunday afternoon with a fire roaring, a few daffodils have popped, a willow tree and forsythia bushes provide some pale green and yellow hints of color. Against the pallid setting, the deep crimson tree buds that have recently sprouted look practically obscene in their teasing suggestion of what is to come.
This is a time of year when I’m likely to spend more on cut flowers than food at the grocery store, anything to banish the gloom.
To address this interval of dreariness, the Spanierman Gallery in East Hampton has hung a show of spring flower still lifes, landscapes, and abstract paintings full of the light and color we are all so desperately ready to observe. And if the title, “Light of Spring,” is more suggestive than literal, it hardly seems to matter.
For those who need some transition into Technicolor, there are three colorless but atmospheric oils by Pamela Sztybel on paper, board, and canvas. Each support brings a different quality of opacity and light to the foggy environment. Views of Mecox evoke a South Fork haze. A view of Connecticut is darker and more dramatic, using the properties of the canvas to produce a painting heavier in color and texture.
Priscilla Bowden’s work appears to portray a landscape waking up, and in at least one instance that is true. “Forsythia (at Maidstone Golf Course)” is a thinly foliaged scene warmed by the presence of forsythia in the foreground.
Other landscapes are less clearly or literally spring-inspired. In both the sketch and the larger painting of “Two Yellow Trees,” the trees of the title appear to be in a fall landscape, even if they are colorful. “Sag Harbor Turnpike” and “Sagg Pond” share the same golden qualities of early fall, but it is reassuring nonetheless to see them in a prior state of warmth.
A much cooler approach is taken by Shari Abramson and Deborah Black, whose compositions on view tend toward the bluer side of the spectrum. Ms. Abramson’s “Spring Markings,” “When Rain Has Passed,” and an untitled work have a Joan Mitchell-like quality, completely abstract and patchy, showing a scene as if viewed quickly through a wet and dirty window.
Ms. Black’s gouache and acrylic paintings on paper are heavy on the purple and sometimes brooding, but tranquil and pleasant. Some, such as “Glade,” are more suggestive of actual landscapes than others, but all appear literal on some level. The flatness of the gouache ennobles the compositions, tamping down the sometimes showy vulgarity of the acrylic paint.
Roy Nicholson’s “Vernal Passages” are pretty accumulations of pinks, golds, and sometimes blues on snowy white backgrounds that appear to subsume some of the colors. The effect is pond-like, if that pond were frozen or snow-covered.
Spanierman Gallery
“Bouquet II” by Cornelia Foss has hot colors and flowers more summery than spring-like — a welcome diversion from winter’s end. |
In Robert Dash’s paintings in the exhibit, two abstracted views portray entirely different landscapes. In “Sagg Main #1,” a green and bucolic landscape looks peaceful and uncompromised. Another painting, “Sagg Main #7,” appears to be a similar view now corrupted with fleshy colors and signs of overpopulation.
Ty Stroudsburg offers cheery oil-painted views from close to home and far away, including a pink and white riot of “Noyac Blossoms” and a yellow sea of “Mustard Fields.”
Cornelia Foss’s simple still lifes of summer flowers on bright grass-green backgrounds are almost too much hot color for our sensitive eyes. The cosmos, hibiscus, black-eyed Susans, dahlias, and other blooms form modest bouquets. Her garden views give a more lush and wild effect in gradations of yellow and green. The roses in her “My Mother’s Yellow Plate” are deep and fiery red, the plate a deep Provencal yellow.
Jane Wilson and Frank Wimberley are two artists whose works in the show are less about spring and more about light. Ms. Wilson’s “Lingering Blue: Water Mill” has a deep and magical quality of the last possible fading light of day segueing into night’s final darkness. “Rain, Heavy at Times” is another classic Wilson treatment: primarily big sky with just a trace of landscape at the bottom.
Mr. Wimberley’s abstractions from three decades offer more light and color, although most are tempered with darker elements. “The Light, the Sea” is pure expression — memory and sensation filtered through a black box. “Prologue,” from 2005, layers paint and applied bits of paper, canvas, and sand to create texture and a varied topography. The yellow paint creates atmosphere, but it is striated vertically by a palette knife and the collage elements discourage any literal reading.
All in all, the works are a welcome break from reality and another gray and mostly lifeless South Fork “spring” day. The paintings will be on view until April 21, with a sequel, “Light of Spring II,” to open on April 24.
