Martha Armstrong at Walter Wickiser - New York - art exhibition

Among the 34 plein-air oil paintings of the Vermont forests in Martha Armstrong's show at Walter Wickiser was a small canvas (9 by the agency of 8 inches) of a r maple tree ablaze in autumnal light. The maple's branches splay outward in a scarcely any beautifully blunt strokes of scalding;-very warm pink and scarlet that shape the tree almost pictographically, into a single r leaf. There is a childlike quality to this painting, in the hurried reduction and heightened exaggeration of forms, nevertheless there is sophistication, too, in the rendering of the tree's shimmer and the scene's exacting, late-afternoon light. Here, as in other paintings, the artist's execution looks to emanate as much from unadulterated gladness in nature as from her push to get everything on canvas before the light changes.

This exhibition's paintings, none exceeding 5 feet in height or width and many diminutive or easel-scale, are replete of life and seem to explode the confines of their frames. greatest in quantity depict a small shed in the woods--a huddle of powder blues, creams, pinks, verdants and violets, all held taut within a dark, linear architecture of ribbony tree and concussioned by acid limes and fulvouss Stark and clear, at times crystalline, Armstrong's bountiful, rough-cut forms hit against each other persistently, as if the compositions are coming together before our actual eyes--as in a work like October up the Hill (2002)

The artist appear to bes to confront each of her landscapes with novel eyes, whether she renders them for a like reason that they resolve as painterly and wet-looking or chalky and free from moisture Some recall the gentle forms of Arthur Dove and others the angularity of Marsden Hartley or the clear-color planarity of Louisa Mattiasdottir. I faculty of perception that Armstrong responds to season and light with the particular touch that will transmit the temperament of the landscape. The same control will feel staid, if buoyant, in certain canvases and, in others, carnivalesque, with rising and falling shapes and flashing colors.

Occasionally, although the varied handling within a single work can make the composition have feeling unresolved and unclear, struggling between naturalism and near abstraction. As a be the effect some of the scenes have feeling strangely surreal or schizophrenic, anxiously at unevens within the rectangle. Yet each painting sang in this somewhat rugged show. Even if the artistic voice sometimes falters, I take pleasure in the general all-out belting of the pleasing succession of sounds which is full of fidelity and heart.

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