From this month into July the Whitewater Gallery in East Hardwick is featuring paintings by Kathy Stark of Craftsbury Common. As she writes in her overview of places she has exhibited over the years, “I am an abstract artist, since the 1980s. I have been working with repeat images. The focus has been on using a repeat mark to create paintings with depth, movement and light.”
In this exhibition her works can be grouped into three different phases: pieces primarily of colored dots, collages in horizontal bands with writing and abstract shapes combined in very studied compositions. They illustrate her explorations in being able to bring minute details into coherent wholes, much as Middle Eastern carpets manage to create a calm and harmonious unity out of numerous repeated elements.
The dot works at first suggest the pointillist technique of Seurat and other late Impressionists, but here they are not describing natural scenes. Rather, they have a shimmering quality, comparable to the vibration of atoms I fields of energy at the most micro level of matter, where nothing is really solid. One could almost use these paintings in meditation and dissolve oneself into the cosmos. The clouds of dots are sometimes juxtaposed with vague diagonal, vertical and horizontal bands to give more structure and there seems to be an inner light generated by the choice of colors and visual textures. The titles are imaginative and intriguing: Deferred Dreams, Stories from the Heart, Now and Never Again, The Things Left Unsaid, In the Country of Dreams, The Movement Is Rich In Possibilities, Loss of Connection with the Future and The Edge Between Fear and Excitement.
The collage and writing works are from a somewhat earlier style, and many are characterized by layers of narrow horizontal bands ranging from eight to 20 in number, all in subdued colors with a great variety of rhythms and textures. Leaves, flowers, feathers, fragments of maps, musical notes and other repeated motifs blend in with adjoining strips of short vertical pen marks and carefully lettered words without spaces between them that one tries in vain to decipher. One piece, Deep in the Night the Deer Cry Out Beyond the Edge of Dream, dominates the gallery wall dramatically with its long rectangular shape of at least seven feet, though hardly a foot wide. The amount of detailed work here is quite astonishing, a tribute to the unusual patience and persistence of the artist.
Other works in this mode have somewhat different compositional structures, such as Sound of One Hand Clapping #3, the title taken from the famous Zen koan. It has a floating assemblage of heads taken from old phrenological books illustrating different types of human personalities, with small pieces of printed pages interspersed, all carefully balanced. Another collage of the same title but numbered XV depicts the very linear palms of hands as in fortune telling, with similarly difficult to read texts. Conversations With My Mother is quite poignant, having two small portrait photographs and several hand written calendar pad notes with dates like January 19 or May 12.
The most recent paintings in the exhibition are quite a departure from her previous work, though incorporating some of the elements like dots and checkerboard patterns. The larger forms are mostly abstract and unnameable, reminding one of some pieces by Surrealists of the 1920s and 30s. They are very consciously structured, though with a certain playfulness in their spatial ambiguity, where overlapping shapes are inconsistently positioned, strictly speaking impossible but fun. There is a lot of movement of curves and diagonals, constrained by contrasting horizontal bands and curtain-like black edges. Receding and advancing solid colored circles and finely dotted surfaces are juxtaposed with the textures of checkerboard areas. Almost as an amusing exception to the overall abstraction, some forms bring to mind stars, the sun, flowing water and even a basket with red fruit and spiky plant leaves. Again the titles are original if puzzling: Happening Somewhere Else, You Can Get There From Here, Many Moons – Many Eclipses, Where the Hummingbirds Feed in the Winter, How Different Than I Imagined and Taking the Long Way Home.
This show will continue into July. Hours at the Whitewater Gallery are from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays. For more information, contact James Teuscher at (802) 563-2037 or the artist 1 [email protected]
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
