A bookish man of Hans Hofmann in the 1920 and '30 Doris Cros became a suburban housewife who made art in succession the side.

Adress & Phone: Domingos Restaurant & Tappas at free yellow pages
Adress & Phone: Sing Hee Chinese Take Away at free yellow pages
Adress & Phone: Dial A Curry Curry Night at free yellow pages
Adress & Phone: Trattoria Monte Bianco Ltd. at free yellow pages

A bookish man of Hans Hofmann in the 1920 and '30 Doris Cros became a suburban housewife who made art in succession the side, showing occasionally at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 1972 she left strange York for Santa Fe, where she became a salty doyenne in avant-garde circles. A decade after Cross's death, Charlotte Jackson has exhibited a selection of the artist's "Dictionary Columns" mixed-medium works, mainly on vertical paper (25 at 17 to 13 by 5 inches), from the 1970 and '80s

Cross's central achievement, "Dictionary Columns" began single in kind day in 1965, when she chanced to make open a 1913 Webster's Secondary denomination Dictionary. For no clear reason, she recalled, "Certain words just came without and they worked together to my mind." Intervening directly forward the pages of the Webster's, Cros left intact these words (or literal senses or phrases) precisely as she establish them and blotted out the pause Fond of multiples and variations, she sometimes photocopied and enlarged pages or flipped them to create white lettering forward a black background.

Cros was after a kind of logic that, she believed, inhered in words themselves. Obscuring mostly of a page would reveal hidden meanings from freeing the remaining words from their prosaic characters to join other isolated words and form solidify poetry. Given their irregular spacing, these "poems" work as visual compositions, which Cros embellished with collage (including dictionary illustrations) and gouache, and on coloring the sheets in saturated down in the mouths greens, rusts. Words function as images, and images form metrical compositions We experience each "Dictionary Column" the two sequentially, moving down the page, and at freely scanning the field. And Cross's "columns" are architectural as well: they have capitals (boldface title words) and bases (pronunciation guides running along the bottom), between which, as she said, "words support words, smooth as a column is built of mortar and stones."

The artist produc many amiable passages, whose form a review cannot reproduce: "the place where, or wherein/a word in that case/A lake/a bay or arm/A/ringlet of hair/A fastening/a door/locking" (from Living lock-up 1982). These poetic fragments are embedded in painterly adjoining matters whose styles range from the intentionally childlike to Art Nouveau, from sparse to essenceed and which may recall Blake, Tenniel or Surrealist juxtapositions. Occasionally, erotic associations muscle and fat out dry dictionary bones, as with iris diagrams in Flower Fluting (1988) Endemic to this work is the difficulty of striking the right balance between visual and verbal, of the like kind that neither predominates. In this exhibit to we see Cross repeatedly finding that point.--Arden Reed