I live in the Pacific Northwest for many reasons and one is that I hate glare. In the summer I wear hats and sunglasses. I love the gentle shifting half-light of our overcast skies. I also love night paintings, for their controlled light and for the possibility that things will change their shape and their meaning as you wrap your eyes around them. In the night, or half-light, it’s easy to assume what you should always assume – that things are not necessarily what they appear to be. This month I’ve seen several works around town that remind me that if I won the lottery my art collection would include a lot of night paintings.
Gene Gentry McMahon’s first show in ten years is up this month at Grover/Thurston Gallery, and many of the new paintings take place at night or, better yet, twilight. Her big (46 x 72 in.) Jardim (Elvis in Portugal) depicts maybe twenty people in a park. Several are in uniform and even those who aren’t seem to be. The painting is full of borders – land/sea; day/night; church/army; and most disturbingly, public/private. Animals and even the figurative sculptures seem to participate in the lunatic (in the original sense) activity.
Many of McMahon’s other paintings live in that carefully controlled light. In the Night Garden shows us a debutante of fifty years ago, in pink evening dress, hair swept up, peering into an oversized garden of pink roses. Up in a corner, Zorro awaits her.
At G. Gibson Gallery, Michael Brophy shows large paintings (at least three are 74 x 80 in.) firmly placed in the night. Looking at his Full Dark you have to take time to let your eyes adjust, and to find the small figures walking through landscape, and to discern the mountain in the distance. Meadow is two-thirds black sky. Below the horizon we see an endless expanse of green grass (by what light?). Pallet Fire is a gorgeous bonfire in the eastern Oregon desert. You’re aware simultaneously of the great paint handling on the surface of the canvas; the dramatic image of an event and a place; and of every part of you that burns.
At Bellevue Arts Museum, Anna Skibska’s Follow the Line: The Path to Form (through September 21) takes place in a constant half-light. Skibska uses a small torch to join both flat and cylindrical glass rods into three-dimensional constructions. The glittering architectural forms are suspended, and seem to change shape as you move around them and see different areas catching the light. Her work is fragile in its material and, I would guess, in its presentation. Without the highly controlled lighting, an artificial twilight, the dream houses might almost disappear.
Victoria Josslin
Image: Gene Gentry McMahon, Jardim (Elvis in Portugal), 2008. Oil on canvas tarp, 46 x 72 in.
“ . . . The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light . . .”
From Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats, 1899.
