Colorful End to Summer
Place for Color: Paintings by Donald Beal and Cathleen Daley
By: Jane Hudson - Sep 10, 2006
Kolok Gallery, Windsor Mill, North Adams, MA
September 9-October 11, 2006
For the final show of its first season, Kurt Kolok Gallery is featuring oil paintings by two artists affiliated with Provincetown. Donald Beal is a long-time resident who teaches at the University of Massachusetts in South Dartmouth. Cathleen Daley is currently attending a 'low-residency intensive workshop' at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center through the Master of Fine Arts program at Massachusetts College of Art.
For both artists, the intensity of light and its effect on color that is so much a part of the visual experience of that Portugese fishing village by the sea, has played a central role in their aesthetic choices. Donald Beal paints 'outside' (he demurred at the expression, 'plein aire'). His experience on the land leads him to take risks with representation where remnants of the place remain in the final image, but the experience of building the painting takes over. He calls this 'improvisational painting', like jazz, where the artist is given a fundamental theme to work with (in Beal's case, the light as it plays across natural forms) and then works toward an internal formal solution. He indicates, as in the "Red Tree" that he will often begin with one solution, and then through inversions of various kinds (in this case he literally turned the canvas upside down!), arriving at something quite different. Beal's success lies in the brilliance of his color as it reflects the play of light across the formal field. One can feel the atmospheres quite intensely as the luminance of the paint itself (he mentions Soutine as a visceral forebear). There are two pieces I feel should not have been part of this show. The "Bather" is tortured (the artist acknowledged this). It is stiff, formally flat, lacks light, and seems totally out of place with the other more playfully complex work. The big blue "sky" (I presume a title here) just doesn't have critical mass. It's a big piece, and suggests events but disappoints in presence as a painting. If the artist really wants to tackle abstraction, then there must be so much more thinking beyond the reference. His parting words to me were, "I'm going out on limbs." I'd suggest going even farther out!
Cathleen Daley's abstractions (mixed media on canvas) are loosely based in observation, but grow more from the memory of color in an experience, than from any direct representation. Using a combination of oil paint, wax medium, oil stick, and a lot of nuanced variations of these materials, Daley builds up a weighty surface through which chunks of color rise. Sometimes she incises the surface with drawn elements, sometimes allows paint to drip down rather thinly over the surface. The result is contradictory where the color demands lightness and the surface is heavy. These are, however, strategies that have been explored for the decades following the first incursions of the 'abstract expressionists'. Daley mentions her heroes, Joan Snyder, Joan Mitchell (and Joan of Arc). She hopes to continue the discourse of painting opened up by and for women in contemporary history through her exploration of presence, of the perception of paint, of the suggestion of a language of color and line, and through an internal dialog that seeks expression through gesture. These are old longings, and are to be commended as resources to be mined. Still, there is nothing that can be taken for granted in the project of making art. One must constantly retool one's expectations, interpretations and histories in order to 'grow' the work. Daley's charming daughter Margaret remarked to her mother upon our meeting, 'Mom, your tongue is blue." To which her mother replied, "it's a place for color!" To which I say, let the color speak with full knowledge and without sentiment.