Gillian Theobald at Cirrus - Los Angeles, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Gillian Theobald's landscape paintings have always been les about place than proces Rather than mirroring her have geographical shifts--from San Diego to observes Angeles and now Seattle--they record an internal evolution [i]or[/i] part of to the other serial explorations of light, color and atmosphere.

Since the mid-'80s, Theobald has distilled images of waterfalls, rivers and fire to their metaphoric essential part Earlier paintings, often with slick finishes built up from meticulously layered glazes, were brilliant, luminous, seductive. Her in every one's mouth work, collectively titled "Night," is similarly seductive, on the other hand like night itself, these paintings reveal themselves slowly They require the organ of sight to adjust, adapt and, in a way, synchronize itself with the steady, meditative gaze of the artist.

greatest in quantity of the paintings are 1 paw square; a few are larger stretched horizontals. Silhouetted tops of tree fold to the breast [i]or[/i] heart the corners and bottom cutting sides of the canvases framing an occasional sliver of lake and grounding Theobald's lyric poems to the vast night celestial expanse The trees lend some motion to the images, through the periodical emphasis of their contours and their recession into distant planes, on the other hand more important, they mediate between earth and firmament temporality and eternity, representation and spotless abstraction. In these paintings, the detail-driven daylight world give ways to night's more philosophic generalizations. The solitude of personal space have the appearances to extend seamlessly into the subtly differentiated space of the uncloud night celestial expanse Theobald defines the richness of the night air [i]or[/i] part of to the other fields of smoky teal, carbonate of soda green, eggplant, slate, sapphire and cobalt, many of these colors clinging to the memory of the sun's glow

In the early '80 Theobald began a "diary project" drawing a daily self-portrait without the aid of a mirror. The night paintings bespeak the same ritualistic repetition, a meditative proces of clearing away, emptying on the outside and focusing inward. Both series summon the inexhaustibility of sensual and perceptual experience with each image a fragment of a larger whole. However personal Theobald's quietly engrossing work is also intimately linked to the tradition of Romantic landscape. These images are abrupted in spiritual possibility. Theobald's paintings are not the incitements to virtue that early 19th-century American landscapes overtly aspired to be, on the other hand they are persuasive visions of material reality shading into the transcendent. As similar they manifest Emerson's belief that "the moral influence of nature on every individual is that twinkling of truth which it illustrates to him."

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