Louise Hamlin

(Blue Mountain Gallery, October 20–November 8, 1989)

With two new series of pastels on paper—city and country views—Louise Hamlin shows how a grounded vision and a vibrant touch can add up. The excitement is in the synthetic way she pushes realism, the artifice in perfect balance with the actual image.
   In most realism shown today, the artist doesn't emphasize their own hand. Also, most realism is tonally based and colors emerge out of a middle gray ground. In Hamlin's realism, both touch and color are self-consciously and conspicuously developed. Her touch bobs and weaves across the surface, breaking it down into dazzling configuration of marks. Her color is blended deeply and physically, until it is infused with personality while managing to stay specific to the forms. Her wild palette, emphasizing violets, pinks, reds and oranges, simmers like a pulse, and is well balanced by lush blues. Black becomes a vibrant color, not merely a bridge or filler to get from one passage to another; nor is it used merely to make a form turn in space.
   Hamlin can bring out the velvet feel of the sky at dusk and the plushness of a tree. She especially loves the heavy shimmer of the city street on a wet night—reflection and shadow fusing to a luscious stew of painterly activity.
   Though both of your reviewers enjoyed the landscapes, we found them more conventionally figurative and less developed than the city scenes. The city scenes provide both an amplified window to the world, and an expressive and resonant surface.

Written with Eric Holzman

(Cover, January 1990)