Deborah Maverick Kelley/Alphonse Van Woerkom
Deborah Maverick Kelley brings the mysterious imagery of the fairy tale into modern times. Her lone female characters are shown in dream pauses conjuring up some menacing encounter or more happy book ending. They lie gripped in bed watching scary movies on portable tv or on top of the covers imagining the world beyond the prairie patch we see through windows and open doorways.
Her paintings are full of openings to other rooms and long corridors that lead back into cavernous possibilities. Sometimes we're actually peeking in through windows or at a cutaway room interior where a wall has been conveniently removed for our probing inspection. Horses run through the shadows at the last spark of sunset. Eyes look askance as at a wrong sound heard, or as if the neighborhood has become suddenly unfamiliar.
In The Silent Caller, a woman, covering herself with a bath towel, glares at the empty telephone that has obviously just interrupted her luxurious bath. The echoes of the intrusion crescendo in the geometric expanse of the stark room, devoid of any furnishings. We see the bathtub, warm vapors rising invitingly, through a doorway. Through windows we see the tops of city apartment buildings with every window lit, late evening, a whole town of possible culprits.
She's concerned less with effects of paint than she is with the psychological dramas rendered; that is, she wants the painting to be focused on, not the paint. Yet she is a fine painter, with the pristine precision of a miniaturist. Though we're not fooled into thinking we're looking at an actual scene, we do supplant the notion of looking at a painting by getting caught up in the folk-like rendered fantasy she so successfully conjures up. These aren't just scenes Ms. Kelley interprets, they're mood s that convey the solitary thoughts and dreams of her characters. They ring with familiarity.
Alphonse Van Woerkom's interiors similarly depict minimally occupied rooms but his much larger canvases (they're all around 72" x 84") employ a much broader brush stroke and a much more open surface style. While the scenes are depicted in a realistic manner, the generous application of paint and the way the colored, swirling strokes blend into each other like cake frosting, yield up a tone of immediacy and the sparkling crispness of an improvisation forged and animated by emotion but guided by a careful craft.
Like tiny noir films, each frame creates a scenario ripe with the moments just past and as yet to come. He fashions atmospheres out of childhood memories called up for reinterpretation and manages to recreate the child's sensation of surprise and the comfy private patter of the smooth sailing imagination.
The chairs and carpets in his paintings are all as plush as the velvet drapery of old theaters, as are the trees lit by headlights. Though not extraordinarily thick, the paint is built up for a rich, meaty surface. The quick as an instinct surface texture shows off the fluid dimension between the observable and imagined, the recalled experience and the process of interpretation.
While his palette and surface are much looser and more extravagant than Ms. Kelley's, the two artists are mining the same sober territory of isolated thoughts, an environment of sparse furnishings that leaves plenty of room for meditative reverberations. Both painters, Ms. Kelley with her minute details and total abandonment of the rules of perspective, and Mr. Van Woerkom, with his broad expanses of lush colors, get to the exact awesome feelings that you might not talk about but can make images of. Images that reflect on moments or periods in your life that make up the headlines in your personal newspaper.
(unpublished)