Michelle SparkCity Feasts/Country Dreams It's not just the scenes we're given in these new paintings by Michelle Spark but the lush atmospheric residues of each as well. Her costume epic depictions of a 40s nightclub interior, a basement jazz club, a garish Chinese restaurant exude the exuberance and clatter or smoky, red-lit piano chord suspense of the places. A bawdy good-humored social realist, she picks sparkling locales and fires them up with an exaggeration that pulls them into the picaresque and we along with them. She chronicles neighborhood street corner scenes and the public places where neighbors and others gather but, with her cartoon-induced interpretation, gives it all an aspect of theatricality. We're intoxicated by the romance of their b-movie splendor and wide-eyed peeks at some wild, abandoned night life. They freeze epitomal moments rife with action. We get pulled in the process of reading the painting, of deciphering and interpreting every corner of activity and every relationship loaded with narrative implication. The paintings make us want to be there. Someone's passed out on a table, but it looks like a fun joint. In "Jazz Club," i.e., the pianist's expression slows down time and eases the muscles of our body as we hear his suspended chord in the mellow night. Her vision is truly unique. Reginald Marsh's rapturous paintings come to mind as a precedent for both style and subject matter though his could be more lewd. These are as satirical and hint at, expose and celebrate good times as much as he did but they refrain from his male-fantasy vision of bodies oozing with lust. Hers are more hilarious. The rendering is more painterly in a cartoony way, as well. The drawing is rich, with bold outlined figures and wispy lines delineating more delicate substance. The compositions are built up and worked out carefully with each element put together intentionally. The surfaces are broken up in interesting ways. Her working out and putting together of color is terrific and personal. In La Traviata or, Isn't It Romantic, we have an opera-box view that shows us the first two rows of refined audience, marble columns, velvet curtains, the orchestra, and the stage splenderous with dramatic stairway, candelabras, attendants, and a couple at the height of an impassioned duet. In Eastern Gardens the characters are imbued with a solidness and bulk that reminds me of Van Gogh. Done with tight brushstrokes the result is a weightiness and more compacted surface of composed masses than the others have. Like an urban Hokusai, she shows the effect of the elements as pedestrians and cars struggle through the heavy rain and whipping breezes that toss loose newspaper around in Hurricane Gloria. An event extensively covered in the press but here given the immediate neighborhood effect that permanizes the more personal moment. A little too often her brushwork is too loose giving the impression of an unfinished section of canvas, a facile veneer. This takes a pinch out of the appreciation of the illusions she so deftly creates. For a while the overall impact of the scene is immediately lush, the less careful craft that composes it is pulling toward a less exalted realm of illustration. In spite of this mild reservation, these are delightful and impressive works that fuse the elegance of baroque embellishment to a roguish vision. (Cover, April 1986) |