ABSTRACT ART - SHOW SUMMONS THE IMAGINATION
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2002
Section: LIFESTYLE
Edition: ALL
Page: B1
Byline: By Kevin Lynch
The Capital Times Painter Anne Raymond's new art show opens up a window into contemporary abstract art that is rarely seen in local art galleries.
It's like letting in a world of sensation thick with ocean mists, windblown fires and scents of the forest.
If you submit to these powers, you may - with the help of her titles - imagine scenarios: a sailor sensing the vastness of the ocean all around him. Or a widow longing for the sailor who never came home from sea.
Raymond's blend of sensation, color and evocative power is one of the strongest demonstrations of painterly skill in recent memory.
"Anne Raymond: Large Paintings and Monotypes" is on display at Wendy Cooper Gallery, 824 E. Johnson St., through Feb. 24, with a reception for Raymond from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday.
The artist was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Texas. She lives in East Hampton on Long Island, only a few miles from the Atlantic coast and close to a white pine forest. That area was the stomping ground of the original abstract expressionists: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, et al.
Raymond's oil paintings extend that tradition and will surely remind some of Rothko, in their floating rectangular configurations. While admitting Rothko's influence, Raymond says she was less affected by his forms than his exquisite tonal qualities and spiritual power.
Raymond's work has received strong East Coast reviews, is extensively shown in one-woman and group shows, and is in numerous corporate collections.
Meanwhile, Madison's art scene is strongly biased toward socially "relevant" content and imagery, regardless of how effectively the art addresses the issues.
"Good art outlasts the events that prompt the artists to make it," wrote New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman in a recent essay on monuments to tragic events. That is, good art reflects the very liberty and values that outlast those events. Raymond's art speaks of experiences cultivated - or discovered - in the clear air of cultural and spiritual freedom.
Raymond's environmental experience feeds her style and expression. In the early 1990s, she lived in Manhattan, and her work of that period reflected the energy and architectural complexity - and pollution - of that setting.
Living on rural Long Island has changed her work and deepened her vision and sense of space, she says. "Now I want the luminosity of the canvas to reflect the really clear light," she says.
"It's so different here, as it probably is in Madison, or any place around water. It keeps the light pure, really clean and luscious. I work on surfaces and work with a lot of glazes. So I don't let the opacity ruin the freshness."
The best of Raymond's big new paintings sustain an extraordinary floating radiance in their colors and textures.
Her refined energy can intimate inner psychic states or qualities of natural phenomena - as in "Convergence...Red" or the fulminant "Red" - like a firestorm tumbling down a waterfall.
Such brightly expressionistic images are warm enough to lend a glow, one imagines, to the gallery after hours. But brilliant colors can obscure weaknesses of technique or execution.
And yet Raymond's cooler images - two paintings in blue and a third in green - reveal a visual sorcery that is hers alone. Part of her technique is a scribbly web of dark lines that loosely weaves together the pure color and glazes. In "Departure," that web's approximate solidity is something to visually hang onto as you gaze into the receding blue, which murmurs of faint wonder and foreboding.
The sister canvas to this is "Far at Sea." Here the deep darkness of the overall palette suggests the moment when dusk has expired. But the blue-white light in the middle is a luminous, ghostly beacon, perhaps like the deep-sea occurrence of St. Elmo's fire.
Taken together, the two canvases evoke the experience of both people deep at sea and those shorebound - say, the crew of the Pequod of "Moby Dick," and the title character of "Ahab's Wife," the richly imagined recent novel about the spouse of the Pequod's obsessed captain.
As a respite from this art of deep, distant space, Raymond's green canvas, "Close of the Day," conveys the atmosphere of an environment closer to home: the outer edges of the white pine forest standing not far from Raymond's doorstep.
"The bark on the trees gets dark and delicious after rain and the vines are ethereal," she says.
Similarly, her smaller monotype prints are relatively comforting works of verdant texture and quietly buzzing energy.
And yet Raymond's work is increasingly about risk even though as a painter, her creativity dances with technical mastery.
"I was formerly a commercial illustrator and I used to be much more perfectionistic," she explains. "I think the creative experience helps us to know ourselves better if we let it happen. With the monotypes, I have much less control. You really must let go when you print it.
"I feel that letting go can be enriching for a viewer - whether they respond to my work or not - to let go of certainty and trust that they can experience something regardless of whether it looks real. It's like loving music, finding something wonderful in the sound.''
Reprinted with permission of The Capital Times.
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