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"Still life is painter's cup of
tea", Galleries, Cate McQuaid To borrow from Oliver North's lawyer: A still life is more than just a potted plant, even if it portrays one. This most serene of painting formats lets the artist flex essential muscles of composition and tone. The lessons of abstraction can be learned from a still life: tensions of shape and line, harmony of elements. ...Jane Goldman...(has a show) that tackle(s) the challenges of this tradition. Anyone who has passed through Logan Airport in the past couple of years may know Goldman's work: she created the terrazzo floor designs depicting sea life in the terminals' hallways. they give visitors the rather divine illusion of walking on water. When she's not making public art, Goldman paints watercolors, and her exhibit at Hess Gallery at Pine Manor College shows her to be an artist of vision and precision. Watercolor is a chancy medium: it blots, soaks, and runs,. It takes a deft hand to master. Goldman demonstrates her expertise in the still life "Big Yellow Orchid," a work so peppered with fine detail it's hard to believe it's a watercolor. At the same time, the medium's classic translucence won't let you mistake it for another paint. Goldman set s the plant as a tangle of stem, leaf, and berries. draping and crisscrossing one another as they arc toward a cascade of yellow petals. Warm sunlight pools on the surface of the glass vase, then diffuses through the water within and glimmers in the center of the vessel's cool shadow The abstract pattern of shadows the flowers leave on the white tabletop could bed a painting in itself, shifting from blue to mauve, its shadow infused with light. This artist doesn't' do only still lifes. Her "Tidal Pool" series captures plant life dancing beneath the water's surface. Ten there's a series of constellation images, more about myth and dream than light, set against dark, liquid blue skies studded with stars. These have psychoanalytic titles, conflating the unfolding unconscious of an analysand with the cosmos and with ancient myth. the works are velvety and elegant; they call for a degree of intellectual engagement that the still lifes don't the still lifes merely pulse with their won existence, reveling in the the light.
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