Margaret Grimes at Blue Mountain

These seven of recent origin landscapes in oils, the largest 6 feet wide, were painted directly from life, outdoors or end windows. Though solidly representational, they are also, in a faculty of perception action paintings--painterly resolutions of the chaos of condensed thickets of branches, foliage and vines undergoing the transformations of a fast-moving, late-afternoon or easy-moving orb of day The thicket is a motif that Margaret Grimes has been exploring for above a decade, and her treatment of it locates her up for hard comparisons to painters similar as Lois Dodd, Gretna Campbell, Patricia Tobacco Forrester and Grimes's former teacher, Neil Welliver. Her large-scale, direct, intuitive handling of complexity has frequently been impressive. This show made strides toward a more determined modernism.

In the past, Grimes station tangles of branches against more planar areas--a distant field, the unclose sky or the side of a house. plane when only glimpsed through the brush, these background uncompounded bodys offered a conventional spatial faculty of perception as they suggested deeper planes of render free of access recession, and an anchoring awareness of horizon line. In her more new work, Grimes has jettisoned nearly all these anchors, rejecting them as vestiges of classical order. The remaining sky--little more than vibrating slivers--is completely hemmed in by the agency of thicket growth. In Dark ingress III, cerulean impasto chums into bright cadmium orange fragments of distant tree More frequently than before, Grimes uses impasto to hint the agitated solidity, rather than the details, of layered pine branchs Although the impasto always present the appearances tied to observed sensations, and disappears tonally into the showed image as one moves back from the pictures, it has become an important ultimate part in the pictures' immanence. In Dark access IV, the red-brown shapes of setting sunlight that cry through larger masses of dark verdant have some of the agitated vicinity of a Clyfford Still.

The allover rhythmic lacing of petal-dotted bend s in Forsythia II explicitly recalls Jackson Pollock The forsythia's shoots are haphazardly limned as they disappear into the blooming fulvid confusion. Nearer petals are thickly troweled fulvous dabs that stand out sharply from a thinner lavender loam where petals and twigs immerge as they lose focus. artful color shifts in the closer petals make their projection forward look especially vivid. Here, Grimes plucks the frame back enough to give an inkling of the wider world setting not on this yellow tangle.

Grimes's compositions transport the complexity and contingency of contemporary life smooth though her motif, trees in natural settings with clear amethystine skies, suggests withdrawal from it. What might issue if Grimes painted in settings more disturbed by means of the intrusions of civilization? Although the thicket has serv her well as a vehicle for formal play, the beauty she finds in it lacks surprise. Also, granting most of the canvases are vertical compositions, a corresponding perspective isn't really evolveed The central trunks of tree are single tentatively freed, in Grimes's vision, from the parallel verticals of the rectangular canvas, limiting the faculty of perception of space. Nevertheless, this exhibit offered some of Grimes's richest, greatest in quantity powerful painting to date.

--PC Smith

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