{"id":6226,"date":"2015-09-28T18:46:15","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T18:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6226"},"modified":"2015-09-27T19:53:30","modified_gmt":"2015-09-27T19:53:30","slug":"freedom-and-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6226","title":{"rendered":"Pushing paint"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"High<\/a>

High Falls, Bryce Ely, oil on board<\/p><\/div>\n

There’s a great show in its final days at Oxford Gallery, abstractions from two artists whose work took me by surprise.\u00a0The invitation card didn’t convey how effective their best paintings are, and, as usual, the work\u00a0was powerful insofar as I was mystified by what exactly enabled their imagery to succeed. I’d seen Phyllis Bryce Ely’s work before, when it won an award in the Memorial Art Gallery’s biennial Finger Lakes Exhibition in 2013. I admired her style without finding myself arrested by it as I walked around the exhibit back then. This time, I found myself coming back many times to particular paintings, seeing more as I stayed with it. Her work hovers\u00a0right on the cusp between representation and abstraction. It’s always a distillation of a landscape, often involving swirling or falling water. This time, moving from one painting to another, I was reminded of both Charles Burchfield and Arthur Dove, yet her work departs from both influences. Where these two earlier artists were\u00a0more concerned with careful depiction of a heightened vision of nature, Ely wants to create and convey a quiet energy by giving\u00a0priority to the paint itself,\u00a0making visible the way it flows from her brush, creating line and form with the edges of her strokes and slightly unpredictable modulations of tone that flow from the brush as it moves. (Many artists try to paint this loosely; it takes a gift to make it work as consistently as Ely does.) It gives her a special affinity with the subject of moving water–her paint seems a slow,\u00a0loping\u00a0doppleganger of\u00a0the rushing flow\u00a0it enables you to see. She’s very much in your face about how she pushes paint around. It’s the first thing that meets the eye, before your eye resolves\u00a0the paint\u00a0into a scene. Her most effective work looks as if, with Welliver, there’s not much\u00a0“going back over” for her. So she’s also\u00a0in a zone between what’s spontaneous and what’s calculated, and yet despite this irrevocable quality in how she applies the paint, the effects are often amazingly evocative–she’s still rendering a scene, with subtle effects of depth and distance, inspiring you to feel there’s more\u00a0detail in the image than is actually there. With so much emphasis on the surface, and the quality of the paint, you still have a distinct and subtle assurance\u00a0of a hazy, glowing light source. Or to put it in layman’s terms: you clearly see the, uh, sunlight. It’s remarkable. She makes you imagine\u00a0more than she requires herself\u00a0to show, which is the magic\u00a0of painting at its best. Her\u00a0technical mastery, from one painting to another, conveys\u00a0a vision of nature in turbulent motion, but going nowhere in particular, an illuminated world giving\u00a0a cold shoulder to\u00a0the eye that eagerly takes it in.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_7549\"<\/a>Todd Chalk, of Buffalo, has included some of her latest work–I counted three different personal modes. Some are more\u00a0conventional abstracts. One especially powerful and effective small painting represents a glance upward through bare branches into an illuminated sky–it’s one of the best pieces in the whole show–and, finally, a series of square watercolors\u00a0on yupo paper. I confess I’d never heard of that paper\u00a0before, but it sounds like the perfect support\u00a0for the green-minded crowd: synthetic, yet recyclable and “100% tree-free” as a promotional website puts it. I love it when artists explore\u00a0unusual materials, and in this case, the qualities of what seems to be primarily\u00a0an\u00a0industrial paper made her intricate, small abstracts fresh, crisp and vibrantly\u00a0colored. Watercolor on waterproof paper suggests an unconsummated\u00a0tension as\u00a0paint and paper fail\u00a0to merge. She puts that romantic suspense\u00a0to use: by keeping all the pigment right on the white surface it adds a special intensity to her beautiful explorations of color. Chalk has created a suite of improvisations with\u00a0color and form, composing intricate Klee-like inner worlds as layered with overlapping tones as a looping\u00a0song. For an artist thriving and innovating into\u00a0her eighth\u00a0decade–if her listed<\/a> birthdate is true–these paintings offer hope for\u00a0all of us\u00a0embarking\u00a0into the final third of our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a great show in its final days at Oxford Gallery, abstractions from two artists whose work took me by surprise.\u00a0The invitation card didn’t convey how effective their best paintings are, and, as usual, the work\u00a0was powerful insofar as I was mystified by what exactly enabled their imagery to succeed. I’d seen Phyllis Bryce Ely’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPushing paint - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=6226\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pushing paint - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There’s a great show in its final days at Oxford Gallery, abstractions from two artists whose work took me by surprise.\u00a0The invitation card didn’t convey how effective their best paintings are, and, as usual, the work\u00a0was powerful insofar as I was mystified by what exactly enabled their imagery to succeed. 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