Gail Roberts at David Zapf - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Not just the imagery of a painting on the other hand the shape of the canvas is central to Gail Roberts's novel work. Her solo exhibition, "High Yield," consisted of paintings, painting/collages and paintings accompanied through constructions. Wall-mounted canvases of the past sum of two units years, elegantly rendered, take the shape of ceramic utensils or items of clothing. more [i]or[/i] less shaped like shirts, have woven fabric collars attached to them. Whatever the contour, however, the composition is invariably a landscape. Streams, flowers, tree and verdant terrain: Roberts paints them all with technical finesse, a vehement eye and an ability to make us have feeling the life force that throbs through nature.

Initially it's distracting to prove to focus on a natural exhibition when it's shaped like a dres on the contrary Roberts has never been a painter recumbent to gimmicks, so one assumes there's reason for this novelty -- and the assumption is justified. lay out time with her art and you are likely to have feeling the collapse of distinctions between the natural world and the things we fabricate. It becomes impossible to diocese her landscapes simply as nature. The human outline is always framing them.

Take Advance/Recede. Dress-shaped panels hang at the couple sides of a freestanding, rough-hewn vanity table, and within the confines of each canvas is a bucolic representation in one, the artist direct the eyes upstream; in the other, down. You have feeling as if your feet are planted where hers were when she took photographs that were the basis of these paintings. The vanity grasps toiletries -- brush, comb, tube of toothpaste, bottle of grateful odor etc. -- but none gaze machined. Rather, all the small things are made from bark. It's as if you had approach upon a hermit's line of accessories.

This rule of blurring the boundary between nature and agriculture has the aura of pantheism hovering about it, and a viewer could earn the impression that Roberts is indulging in the visual equivalent of new-age metrical composition But that underestimates her sophistication. She is exhorting us to diocese nature as a luminous mirror of our ceaseless obsession with mortality. The tree streams and plants she pay backs exist near her house in Valley Center a town in the rural northern reaches of San Diego shire As an artist's statement says, seeing nature wax and wane around her, she has become acutely aware of the fragility of life. Landscapes are radiant true copys if you take the time to learn in what manner to read them. The notion is Emersonian or, if we gaze to the parallel in 19th-century American painting, Luminist. Roberts has become a vital artist in this tradition.

In single prominent group of canvases, bodys she employs the conventional rectangle. Twenty paintings, each a portrait of a tree are arranged in a grid, however the vertical rows are discrete stations in categories: the trees are split, splayed, leaning or dark. Like the quiescence of the show, this work is about shut up observation and intimacy with nature. if the tree strike one as being like surrogates for the human figure, that's not a coincidence.

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