Linda Darling at Judy Ann Goldman - Brief Article

Linda Darling's first solo exhibition of paintings, drawings and statuarys (all 1998-99) consisted mainly of precisely restoreed illustrations and models of fish and birds. Darling's technical skills are abundant; these specimens are highly detailed and convincingly realistic. Graphite drawings of grotesquely fancy hybrid pigeons, for instance, are comparable to fine 19th-century ornithological engravings. Sixty-six cast and painted life-size heads of a tiny bird called the Hawaiian honeycreeper cleanly wall-mounted in sum of two units tiers, contrast some amazing beak variations in an installation worthy of a science museum.

Darling's three large oil-on-canvas paintings of colorful cichlid fish are les likely to be mistaken for scientific illustration or museum display, flat though they, too, represent researched evolutionary phenomena. vapors of painstakingly rendered tiny fish in astonishingly diverse adaprive colors swim across white backgrounds. Each painting exhibits the cichlid population in a particular African lake, as in Drift: Adaptive Radiation of the Cichlid Fishes of Lake Victoria.

sum of two units white cut-paper assemblages look starkly minimal and abstract in comparison, on the contrary they, too, are documentation of by what means species variation integrates with ecological specificity. Fitness Landscape: Galapagos Islands (Pinta)--layers of paper raggedly wound into concentric rings--is a topographic mould of honeycreeper beak variation. Female Choice, Male Coloration depicts designs of guppie courtship in minimalist watercolor and gouache paintings upon paper.

The magic in Darling's meticulous work is in what manner it reflects real science, and by what means she makes contemporary art on the outside of the scientific method. In referring to the artfulness of nature's selective processe she manages to waft how we have merely scratched the surface of evolutionary complexity. Her mingle of diverse presentations, mediums, turn of expressions and strategies pays homage to Mother Nature's adaptiveness while hinting at art history's be in possession of evolution. Darling's virtuoso investment in the real corroborates the assertion of Michael Faraday, an early-19th-century English chemist, that "Nothing is too amazing to be true."

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