Rebekah's animated hand impression
Every year I look forward to the fall opening of the Visual Arts Center at Davidson College. It’s the occasion of the faculty show, and a lot of fun, seeing old friends and new art. It’s a last vivid summer art memory before the chill of fall sets in. Tonight was appropriately sultry and rich. http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x25463.xml
RebekahTolley is new to the faculty and was exhibiting tonight. She is a printmaker who is concerned with exploration. I was privileged to hear her very brief but evocative talk. In just a few minutes she managed to spark my imagination in a dozen ways. She touched on the idea that printmakers today seldom make editions, being less inclined to quality control and consistency than to experimentation. Also touching on the role of the found object in her work, she showed a piece of worm-infested wood she had rolled up with ink and layered over an image of her hands. The key word she played with in the talk was “impression”. One piece recorded a crab’s shell– “the impression the crab has left of itself”, just as prints are referred to as “impressions”. Rebekah also talked about her use of morphing software to create progression, taking her images in the direction of animation. I was particularly taken by an elegant piece with moving hands.
Cristina Toro, who lives in upstate New York, was showing her new paintings in the smaller gallery. Cristina is a friend, and I knew her work would be wonderful, but I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would be. Turning into the gallery felt like walking into a jewel box or a sultan’s tent. Like everyone in my family, she is fascinated by pattern, and her work is a combination of the balancing of bright, but modulated colored boxes, on which appear fanciful figures. There is dancing rhythm, humor, intimacy, narrative, all rendered in fields of flat color covered with pattern … Persian miniatures writ large. There were passages that might have been whole paintings, but instead they rested in the midst of a crazy quilt picnic blanket laid for a feast. It was the Coat of Many Colors. It dazzled. Best of all, it exposed something of the life and times of Cristina. It felt like a heart-to-heart talk, like reading her journal.
detail from a painting by Cristina