Louise Hamlin
Painting and Monoprints
There are eleven paintings here of the city at night and in all of them it is plainly the possibilities of what could be done with the artificial lights that attracted the artist. Her easel is set up so as to notice for us, and clearly to celebrate, a few views on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—Broadway looking the ideal cosmopolitan esplanade, its trees on the meridian illuminated from below, its cars parked for the night angled peacefully at meters, cars kinetic waiting for a traffic light to change, a lone taxi ahead of the pack stalking the broad path, red taillights of a receding group of cars headed north into the dazzling fiesta lights that fill the street andmuch of a canvas.
The range of effects she achieves with the lights varies. In Olympia, Edison and Broadway Night, the street lights glow with a firefly-like haze, beacons against the dark brown tones of the buildings and trees. In the extraordinary Manuel Watching TV, an entire tenement facade is flooded with the light from a street lamp that illumines the details of the flat stone work while above (behind the building) we see the party lights of a busy street in full intensity and reflected effect. In Sunday Times there is some dusk light left, the street lights seem just turned on and a few pedestrians go about their orderly business in the realist brush-stroked street.
These curbside views please immediately in the artist's response to mood and the sense of life going on in the neighborhood. They're much more personal than say, Pissarro's views of Paris. We have the sense that a neighbor rather than a chronicler painted them. We're opened to what the sidewalks offer. We can hear the music from open windows, the whooshing and honking of the traffic, overhear patches of conversation, smell the fresh bread as we walk by the bakery. We're engulfed and welcomed into this depicted community.
As pleasing as these warm local vistas are, with the movement of lines in the angling streets and rising apartment buildings, cars cut off snapshot-like at the edges of the compositions, and the compact activity and pedestrian glory, it is in the two paintings Rain on Broadway and Big Mist that these curb views are made phenomenal with the added effect of rain. Here is where Hamlin can open up and abstract the street reflections and effects of the bright lights. Rather than softening details as in the other paintings, here she takes the opportunity in her rendering of the wet streets and misted colored lights to broaden her strokes, spreading the bright colors into shimmering waves of flourishing reflection, a cadenza of colored lights. She makes a breakthrough here into doing something 'new.' The broad De Kooning-like brushstrokes and the Redon-like blending of bright reds, yellows and oranges of the night lights in the mist, work marvelously to give a solid impression of the rain-soaked street, a painted interpretation more interesting than a merely accurate depiction.
Smokestack Near Columbus Circle is an entirely different painting from the rest. Cars, a smokestack, spraying fountain and street lights float magically in space against a night blackened horizon. Vanishing points have vanished and we fill in the street geometry with our connect-the-dot memories.
In the only bright daylight painting of the show, Cars, we look down at an intersection at which a group of candy-colored cars are poised in an array of activity—doors opening, angling for the parking space. Sunlight floods the concrete to a severe grid where a lone traffic light, trash can and meter cast their simple shadows in this study of pastel colored planes at surprising, almost dizzying, angles.Steam Leak on Varick Street is in dream focus. Our view is thwarted by steam rising in the foreground so the barest hints of the street's colors seem just on the verge of being revealed behind.
A series of ten portrait heads is stunning in the stealing of the sitter's personalities. Each face reveals traits. They're haunting in how accurate a transference seems to have taken place. Though the master draftsman detail of Holbein's portraits isn't here, his sucess in capturing a mood and soul is.
Also on display are a group of monoprints, some hand-colored. Here, in black and white, Hamlin achieves the same dazzling effects of city lights at night, as in the paintings where she had the advantage of bright colors. They're not mere reductions from the painting, or studies. They're quieter in tone and appeal to a more subdued, more refined perception.
When asked at a viewing of this show which was my favorite painting, I replied "That, that, that, that..." This show announces a new, delightful and important presence in NYC painting.
(Arts, Summer 1985)