Archive for July, 2012

Gardenshapes by Kathleen

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

“Beauty should be shared, for it enhances our joys.
To explore its mystery is to venture towards the sublime.”
―Joseph Cornell

I hesitate to use a sports term to begin this review, but, since the Summer Olympics opened last night, I’ll set my disinclination aside to state emphatically that artist Kathleen O’Brien is at the top of her game!

Gardenshapes —an exhibition of her mixed-media collage finishing its run in the main gallery of Danville’s Community Arts Center— has ample proof to support my claim. I made one more return visit yesterday to experience the diverse subtleties of her singular creations.

Inspired by birds and flowers, and exploring the garden as a metaphor, this collection of artworks represents everything that has captivated me for years about Kathleen’s approach. These works have clearly grown out of how she thoughtfully observes and attunes with nature. They also literally contain and preserve natural ingredients. But in contrast to collage that maintains its focus on formal or intellectual juxtapositions, Kathleen’s art always nudges one toward a deeper sense of wholeness and the inner complexity of our balanced existence as both organic and spiritual beings. Without question, she has made a personal commitment to creating art as a mystical practice, and, on a communal level, to providing nature-inspired beauty as a source of healing in a fractured world.

With the strong presence of these intangible dimensions, Kathleen’s art is always esoteric, and yet she manages to make the work accessible to all with her choice of subject matter and allegiance to traditional drawing. At the same time, she can delight the eye of a fellow artist with her methodology, aesthetic choices, and pictorial skill. I’m not ashamed to admit that much of Kathleen’s symbolic virtuosity is beyond my ken, but I appreciate that it’s all in play at the intuitive level. Being near the prolific output of her creative life is simply uplifting, and that’s because all the facets of her art —whether conscious or subliminal— unify as a total perception to nourish the mind, heart, and soul.

Getting back to the show, I was initially struck by the five largest pieces (28 x 36 inches), beautifully presented against white in deep gallery-style frames of natural wood. This “look” is familiar to those who know Kathleen’s art, and enhances the work’s identity as an unique artifact, preserved behind glass, like a rare botanical or zoological specimen. They are titled with reference to the garden theme. In contrast, a separate piece (24 x 30 inches) is presented with its surface exposed in the manner of an easel painting. It looks equally at home, released from behind the glass, expertly varnished in a way that does not distract. Its name is Heaven & Earth, Yin & Yang, Dark & Light, Birds & Trees, Flowers & Bees. My eyebrows lifted as I began to read the lengthy title, but was pleased with the closing rhyme as I finished. This artist always has a quiet surprise in store. Each of the large works is visually distinctive, but very much a cohesive part of a series unified by her long dedication to compositional abstraction, to a consistent theory of color, and to diligent mark making.

The large piece titled Garden for Queen Anne’s Lace is marked by a cellular pattern resembling microscopic tissue, which, while remaining highly abstract, transforms itself into a flower garden, with an interesting emphasis on each “drop of Queen’s blood” that, when closely examined, becomes a dance of circles, squares, and triangles —a dynamic that exemplifies Kathleen’s knack for taking the observer/participant through layers of meaning. The design also incorporates the application of illustrated postage stamps. Kathleen is never far removed from a devotion to cultural references and ephemera, and her Joseph Cornell influences are ever present. A fine example of this are four pieces dedicated to bird-species (16 x 20 inches) that combine found printed patterns with her typical labor of liquid media. Nests are created with random shards and colorful scraps. Dried and painted star-like blossoms effectively merge the organic, symbolic, and celestial. In Kathleen’s collage there are many allusions to language, both literal and archetypal, and here we discover many fragments of the printed word, as well as her “trademark” calligraphy. I was particularly drawn to Garden for Blue Grosbeaks, a strong arrangement of symmetrical and asymmetrical elements that carries out more of her evident investigation into fundamental shapes —circle, square, and triangle. These compositions are anything but static, a characteristic of Kathleen’s art built on a myriad of ways in which she provokes eye movement by simulating the dynamic patterns of nature, often with the application of actual plants and minerals. A perfect case in point is 9 Bird Eggs (30 x 30 inches), with its nimble use of botanicals most artists would overlook as raw material, through which she creates a variety of rhythms within a formal, 3×3 grid structure.

I should mention that Kathleen’s control of what I call “implied viewing distance” is masterful. Enjoying her watercolor effects and hidden treasures up close is inevitably a satisfying experience, as is true with much of current small-scale mixed media collage, but her pieces also can be savored at a distance. I found myself continually studying a work from across the room and then, taking off my eye-wear, sticking my nose near the glass to examine fine detail. Whether from this point of view or from half a block away, Kathleen’s distinctive impression is always recognizable, an enviable accomplishment for any artist. For example, both Royal Lily Garden and Staple Garden contain brushwork that only can be achieved by someone who is continuously handling liquid on a tool and is fully at ease with her surface. On the other hand, she uses this micro-fluency to create the intended multi-layered depth of her macro-composition, and yet I was constantly invited to step back into the intimacy of the picture plane, much as one feels when standing back to admire a flower garden, while being compelled to converge at hand’s length, only to spy a miniature surprise —a dutiful pollinator or tiny feat of nature’s diversity within repetition.

With my fixation on the bigger paintings, it was too easy to neglect the smaller items, so I had to instruct myself to visually isolate and appreciate several other works. Two of these were within squares, and each have treatments not as pronounced elsewhere in the exhibition. Feathers uses paper itself as a dimensional medium, and The Blessing of Rain features a darker atmospheric background —a shimmering chalk texture that makes me wish Kathleen would more intensively explore the potential of pastel effects. In addition, there are three bird portraits (9 x 12 inches), with coatings of what appeared to be beeswax, which recall for me the investigations of 19th-century naturalists. My favorite is Garden for Eastern Bluebirds, with its deft pencil work and luscious color palette. Kathleen pushes her highly capable layering beyond technique to create a sense of time distortion, an interplay of wildlife and cultural antiquity that makes certain the work is much more than a lovely rendering of birds. Throughout this outstanding show are many such allusions to natural and human-made cycles that fuse the worlds of growing things and a striving race that has always responded with symbolic culture to seek a balanced place in the scheme of life.

Indeed, Kathleen O’Brien has found her place. With a home studio close to nature, and a creative passion that distills her observations and meditations through heart, head, and hand, she is a gold-medal artist of the soul.

© 2012, John Andrew Dixon

Garden for Eastern Bluebirds and Garden for Scarlet Tanagers
by Kathleen O’Brien

“Ain’t you afeard?”

Tuesday, July 24th, 2012

What was the world coming to and what hearty pleasures folks today missed out of life! One bag of meal her pap said, used to make a whole family rejoice. Now folks came ungrateful from the store, grumbling they had to carry such a heavy market basket. Was that the way this great new country of hers was going to go? The easier they made life, the weaker and sicker the race had to get? Once a majority of the men got weak and soft, what weak, harmful ways would they vote the country into then? Well, her pap’s generation could get down on their knees and thank the Almighty they lived and died when they did. How would they ever have come and settled this wild country if they said to each other, “Ain’t you afeard?” How would her pappy have fetched them the long way out here on foot if he’d kept asking all the time, “Are ye all right? How do ye feel? Do ye reckon ye kin make it?” No, those old time folks she knew were scared of nothing, or if they were, they didn’t say so. They knew they ran bad risks moving into Indian country, but they had to die some time. They might as well live as they pleased and let others bury them when the time came.
—from The Town by Conrad Richter

This past weekend couldn’t dovetail more aptly with my previous musings on the parallel lines of sweetness and sorrow: the joy of hugging and laughing with Seitz Family loved ones mixed with the ache of seeing Kelly off to his final rest. I’ve never had a big brother. Wayne came the closest. If we had lived in proximity, Kelly might have filled that void in many ways, but now he’s gone, too. Susan’s choice of a strong set of funeral readings moved my spirit. The sadness was balanced with the opportunity for Mombo to see former friends from Tipp City: Jane, Flo, and Mary Jo, and I was able to kiss the cheeks of Angela, Lynnette, and Jenny, while meeting the eyes of Karen for the first time in 35 years. The bitter with the delicious—this seems to be the taste of things for me. Thus it probably always has been, but now I recognize and accept it.

Alyx joyfully announced her engagement, while grieving families in Colorado sorted out the tragic aftermath of a rancid nut-job’s evil handiwork. It’s hard not to wonder what our society is coming to when things like this happen, but how do such dangers compare to the daily risks our ancestors faced with no loss of determination? And if the frontier rangers had caught a murderer, rapist, or horse thief, the misfit would have swung from a noose in short order, without a thought wasted on his psychological deficit or woeful childhood. Perhaps we shall eventually see a would-be exponent of such premeditation swiftly and lawfully cut down by a “citizen sheepdog” who just happened to be carrying his weapon in circumstances one would think it unnecessary to do so.

Dana and I watched The Iron Lady last night, and we found too many flaws in the motion picture to recommend it, but I must say it caused me to remember Thatcher’s firm resolve in crisis. There are many kinds of fear. They must all be cast out—whether by righteous indignation or by perfect love. Throughout a life now cut short, I’m certain that Kelly was afraid at times, but I have always thought of him as one of the most fearless men I have known. Whether it was having the courage to marry young and to bear whatever stigma the world would throw upon his path, or to take on the high-pressure world of corporate sales, or live his convictions as an example to his family … or to bravely face a diagnosis that would suck the hope from someone who didn’t know what he believed. It never seemed written for the two of us to go beyond a periodic big smile and strong handshake. Nevertheless, he always set a fine example from a distance. And, for me, I expect that will continue to be the case.

Saturday, July 14th, 2012

Kelly Lorms


Kelly Lorms
1 9 5 1 – 2 0 1 2
Husband, father, and friend.
He lived life to the fullest.
R   I   P