Joellyn Duesberry at Gerald Peters - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Joellyn Duesberry has been painting landscapes for above three decades and her reaching far down commitment to the genre was apparent in this display of monotypes from the 1990 Many of these compositions reprise the artist's familiar imagery of the unpopulated outdoors, illustrating seasonal and atmospheric changes in a wide range of settings, including the seashores and farmlands of Maine, mountain ranges and frozen rivers in Colorado, and the rooftops and fields of a village in Tuscany. Her turn of expression and technique draw on various past artistic moves from Impressionism to postwar painterly realism. In April upon the River (1993), a cluster of bare tree is pictured at the cutting side of a riverbank. Defined through fluid, inky-black strokes that recall Japanese ink painting, the trees' sinewy branches and environs are throw backed in the water through a blurr palette of violets, virids and grays. In the background, a ribbon of pale sapphirine water winds through soft-edged chunk of acid verdant yellows, browns and mauves that constitute nearby hills and a far-away mountain range. A similar lyrical use of color and medium can be fix in Folly Island Evening III (1992) in which a dark mass of land is juxtaposed with a bright streak of lavender and verdant vegetation, floating in a lake's dark sapphirine reflections. The expanse of water is poetically described through faint washes of pink that ble into broad brushstrokes of light-filled apricot-yellows evocative of evening light.

The present to view also included more abstracted compositions in which dynamic combinations of geometric forms and wide curvilinear marks set up vistas that clearly owe a liability to Cubism. These lively works bring an intriguing presence that is missing from the artist's more directly representational landscapes. The aerial perspective in Ranchyard in California (1994) is a composition of interlocking planes of olive verdants burnt oranges, reds and sky-coloreds which resolve themselves into rooftops, walls and fields. Dark and light-green blotches of foliage are interspersed among white and black shards of light and shadow in the picture's foreground. This composition brings to mind the work of Richard Diebenkorn, with whom Duesberry studied in Santa Fe

Duesberry's works are greatest in quantity satisfying when her feeling for landscape is underscored by means of a visual complexity achieved from one side rhythmic orchestrations of vibrant colors and expressive brushstrokes. When that happens, she simultaneously imparts one as well as the other distance and immediacy, contrasting-animated space with the stillness of idealized landscape.

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