The Artists "Review" Artists Project was launched on June 30, 2008. Below is a "review" of Pam Farrell's work, Lacuna Yellow No. 1, written by Daniel Mafe. Pam provided the second jpeg, an image of Lacuna Blue/Green, as well as a brief response to Daniel's "review."
Pam currently resides in Hunterdon County, NJ, and Daniel lives in Brisbane, Australia.
If you would like to participate in this project, please email me at jtkirkland [at] gmail [dot] com.
Lacuna Yellow No. 1
oil on panel
36" x 48”
2008
The "Review"
Philip Guston in a lecture delivered in 1978 at the University of Minnesota said, “In my experience a painting is not made with colours and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is... The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not physically there at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.”
A strongly modulated acid yellow-green field is punctuated, marked, or is it creased by blurred self-involving gestures. The field is as though stained by sensed rather than explicitly defined colour differentials. The gestures are at once isolated from one another and then linked by a smother of paint that suggests atmosphere and light. The painting though, finally resists this sweet dissolving with a surface that is too materially dense and assertive for such a surrender. This is a painting balanced, albeit finely, on the cusp of a becoming-change.
Prolonged looking reaps its reward. The more I scrutinise the image and reflect on what I see, the more woven I become into its blinding ocean of yellow-greenness. I am reminded of those near abstract paintings by the early nineteenth century British painter J.M.W. Turner or of Cy Twombly’s later re-versionings of Turner in his Hero and Leander paintings of the mid-nineteen eighties. And yet there is a tougher, harder won quality to this painting that allows one to maintain contact with these associations as haunting evocations only.
As a painting it keeps escaping me. It is a subtly yet complexly nuanced piece. It resists a definitive naming and seems well suited to existing in that imagined doubt-full space so well identified and explored by Philip Guston. This is, finally, a painting that flirts and toys with its concrete materiality both as an object in the world as well as an object so well imbued with those painstakingly cultivated qualities that define it as art.
By Daniel Mafe
Lacuna Blue/Green
oil on panel
36" x 48”
2008
The Response
Daniel: Thank you for your thoughtful, informed, and detailed review of my painting, Lacuna Yellow. I especially appreciate how you respond to the formal elements by both asserting your thoughts and leaving room for possibilities. I love that you noticed the intuited aspect of the gestures and picked up on the nuances and subtleties—especially difficult viewing a digital image online. I will continue to think about your statement: “This is a painting balanced, albeit finely, on the cusp of a becoming-change.” It is a lovely thought. I find all your remarks helpful and encouraging. And your writing is wonderful!
Best Regards,
Pam Farrell
By Pam Farrell
Previous "Reviews":
Pam Farrell on Ken Weathersby
Paula McCullough on Aric Calfee
Lee Gainer on Leigh Waldron-Taylor
Aric Calfee on Paula McCullough
Matthew Ballou on Heather Levy
Giovanni Garcia-Fenech on TJ Norris
TJ Norris on Giovanni Garcia-Fenech
Susan Tolbert on Mary Klein
Heather Levy on Gail Vollrath
Sharon Butler on Matthew Ballou
Mark L. Power on Steven Alexander
Steven Alexander on Mark L. Power
Molly Norris on M. Trigos
Ken Weathersby on Joseph Barbaccia
Sondra Arkin on Susan Tolbert
John M. Adams on Sharon Butler
Michael Paul Oman-Reagan on Brent Hallard
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