PORTLAND, ORE.: Paula Overbay at Pulliam Deffenbaugh - Portland, Oregon - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Paula Overbay previously attained her lustrous painted surfaces by means of mixing oils with wax. In this new exhibition of 11 abstract paintings, she achieves the same miraculous issue with paint alone. Her past work, although nonrepresentational, frequently refers to elements in nature, similar as insect wings, rocks, black fogs or moon craters. For this display the artist created overall patterned surfaces that also call up natural forms. Some of her canvases--typically 24 inches square--appear to be fluid environments, resembling protozoan life observ from one side a microscope; others suggest charred thigh-bone bones suspended in amber.

Overbay also showed six charcoal sketches, each of which consists of about a dozen Mattalike doodles. These are studies for the accompanying oil paintings, and they leap over with visual and witty cacophony.

In the suite of paintings, Overbay subdu the bright pigments of her last exhibit in favor of ocher, sepia, umber and olive. Her prolonged process involves applying three or four thin layers of pigment at individual time, scumbling them, then adding white pigment and repeating the color mixture. She may use as many as 100 layers before finding the desired luminosity. During this labor she repeatedly creates a blurred-edge motif which she describes as a gash. It might be vertical, circular or crescent-shaped and is placed center canvas. nooses coils, dots and dashes, similar to the markings of her drawings, take wing around the gash, making the central image appear to be either rapidly moving or disintegrating.

Overbay's themes of composition and decomposition in one as well as the other subject and process are give an inkling ofed by the exhibition title, "Joinings and Separations." In Things Fall Apart a racemelike shape appears to sprout or perhaps spin from the bottom center of the canvas in a background color a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of like green tea. Whirligig forms appear to dart in and about this figure. In her past work, Overbay deliberately painted in these twirls and spirals; here she permits the brushstrokes find them. Visible or not, with each layered brushstroke, the sfumato invigorates the form.

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