Half a Life on Canvas
Expressions of Time
The practice of transforming an object to make it expressive, either
of an emotional complex or of an insight into the nature of the
thing, or both, is something that Gail has done from the beginning
of her career. And so is the alternative method of dispensing with
the object entirely, or more accurately, of making the painting
itself the object. In these stubbornly abstract works, all the aesthetic
elements—form and composition, color, application of pigment—go
to evoke or express a complex of emotions. With the increasing confidence,
or impatience, of age and experience, this mode has become Gail’s
default mode of approaching a canvas. Within this expressionistic
current, Gail has three main branches: paintings of time, of space
and of transcendence.
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Paintings of Movement Derived from the Abstract Expressionism
of artists like Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, paintings
of movement have been a feature of Gail’s artwork from
the beginning: the vigorous application of pigment makes the
action of painting not just the visible embodiment of an internal
state, but an experience felt by the viewer as well. Having
spent two decades as a semi-professional, Graham-inspired
modern dancer, Gail has always responded strongly to the kinetic
character of such work. These paintings dance, fly, swirl
or explode. Their breathless movement contradicts the fixed
two-dimensionality that is their literal existence. Moreover,
because time is a corollary of movement, these paintings also
contradict the spatial simultaneity that is literally what
a painting is. Sometimes, as in the paintings in the upper
row, the movement created by brushwork is everywhere, filling
the plane of the canvas and giving the impression that the
action extends beyond the borders of the canvas as well. In
the paintings in the lower row, on the other hand, the movement
seems to occur in a foreground, a gesture or event that occurs
against a background that may also suggest its own kind of
movement.
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