These seven strange landscapes in oils.

These seven strange landscapes in oils, the largest 6 feet wide, were painted directly from life, outdoors or between the sides of windows. Though solidly representational, they are also, in a mind action paintings--painterly resolutions of the chaos of compressed thickets of branches, foliage and vines undergoing the transformations of a fast-moving, late-afternoon or easy-moving sunshine The thicket is a motif that Margaret Grimes has been exploring for throughout a decade, and her treatment of it stations her up for hard comparisons to painters similar as Lois Dodd, Gretna Campbell, Patricia Tobacco Forrester and Grimes's former teacher, Neil Welliver. Her large-scale, direct, intuitive handling of complexity has ofttimes been impressive. This show made strides toward a more firm modernism.

In the past, Grimes appoint tangles of branches against more planar areas--a distant field, the exhibit sky or the side of a house. steady when only glimpsed through the brush, these background proper states offered a conventional spatial brains as they suggested deeper planes of interpret recession, and an anchoring awareness of horizon line. In her more late work, Grimes has jettisoned nearly all these anchors, rejecting them as vestiges of classical order. The remaining sky--little more than vibrating slivers--is completely hemmed in at thicket growth. In Dark inlet III, cerulean impasto chums into bright cadmium orange fragments of distant tree More frequently than before, Grimes uses impasto to move the agitated solidity, rather than the details, of layered pine branchs Although the impasto always pretends tied to observed sensations, and disappears tonally into the portray by actioned image as one moves back from the pictures, it has become an important proper state in the pictures' immanence. In Dark hall IV, the red-brown shapes of setting sunlight that pip through larger masses of dark undecayed have some of the agitated vicinity of a Clyfford Still.

The allover rhythmic lacing of petal-dotted winds in Forsythia II explicitly recalls Jackson Pollock The forsythia's branchs are haphazardly limned as they disappear into the blooming fulvous confusion. Nearer petals are thickly troweled fulvous dabs that stand out sharply from a thinner lavender land where petals and twigs be swallowed up as they lose focus. jesuitical color shifts in the closer petals make their projection forward present the appearance especially vivid. Here, Grimes plucks the frame back enough to recommend the wider world setting on the farther side this yellow tangle.

Grimes's compositions bear the complexity and contingency of contemporary life equable though her motif, trees in natural settings with clear downhearted skies, suggests withdrawal from it. What might inference if Grimes painted in settings more disturbed by means of the intrusions of civilization? Although the thicket has serv her well as a vehicle for formal play, the beauty she finds in it lacks surprise. Also, notwithstanding that most of the canvases are vertical compositions, a corresponding perspective isn't really bring outed The central trunks of tree are barely tentatively freed, in Grimes's vision, from the parallel verticals of the rectangular canvas, limiting the faculty of perception of space. Nevertheless, this present to view offered some of Grimes's richest, in the greatest degree powerful painting to date.

--PC Smith

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