Artist Photo
“Fire and Olive 0470,” oil on canvas, 2014
The guests hadn’t arrived for lunch, the fire wasn’t yet set, but it was already hot in the downstairs dining room of the Lawn Club.
That’s because the colliding red, orange, heliotrope, and a half dozen other hues in Lady McCrady‘s “Fire and Olive 0470,” her large oil on canvas painting over the hearth, were already having their post-Juno warming effect on the entire room.
The canvas is one of the local artist’s 18 works – nine paintings and nine digital prints of paintings – in Painted Tropics, Midwinter, which runs through Feb. 28.
McCrady’s work is paired with that of New Haven’s Katie Kindilien. McCrady’s blazing abstractions and Kindilien’s far cooler palette, smaller oils, and still lifes and landscapes make for an interesting visual double bill, excellent for snow-weary mid-January eyes.
McCrady said she was very excited to see all the work together for the first time. “I see a stronger connection between the smaller and larger pieces than I’ve seen before,” she said.
“Beer and Donut,” archival digital print
The bigger pieces were about “found scenes and elements of surprise. I’m trying to recapture the feeling I had when I saw them out bus windows, surprising scenes related to danger, cones, barricades,” she said.
The smaller digital prints of paintings are about the opposite subject: protection. She showed a similar series of 20 works back in 2008 as her contribution to that year’s Citywide Open Studios. The idea then was to hang the paintings in a circle of protection that viewers could enter and be safe inside.
McCrady thus was thrilled that the room where the works are now displayed – the downstairs dining area and sun room overlooking the club’s snowed-over tennis courts – is octagonal. She raised her hands and slowly turned around in the center of the space, taking in all her works.
“It’s better than a gallery because you stand in the middle and are surrounded,” she said.
“Cone 0361,” archival digital print
Cones emerge out of McCrady’s representational abstractions as an identifying signature image. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that one of the subjects she had focused on during her master of fine arts training at Hunter College in New York City was the idea of the apocalyptic in art, she recalled.
For her, it was a short trip from contemplations of the end of the world to cones: “They’re so cute, fetishy, flourescent. Cute objects, when in fact their goal is to warn you” that there’s danger ahead.
McCrady’s bio includes laudatory remarks by Andy Warhol, but I find huge influences of Larry Rivers, who mixed figuration dying into abstraction in the same manner. She also has the painterliness of Hans Hoffman.
Her cones work best when you have to seek them out as objects trying to call attention to themselves in a more crowded field of fire or danger. In other works, in which the cone is front and center as the subject, the effect is lessened.
“Friendly Warning 0318”
In “Friendly Warning 0318” (pictured), McCrady uses the frame to make her points. She knocks off a piece of the composition and the canvas, as if it had been winged by a speeding car. Once you get the pun, you’re through with the work. Though it is fun.
The Anxiety and Pleasure of Influence
Katie Kindilien‘s 22 oils are in the adjoining room to McCrady’s pieces – all still lifes and small landscapes of Provence, Vermont, or the artist’s New Haven backyard. The effect is the opposite of McCrady’s. There’s no danger here, but rather a cool meditation on the shapes and volumes of nature, what the artist calls in her statement a “communion.”
“Road to Crillon-le-Brave,” oil on panel
The artists’ different ways of looking at the world both show their artistic forbears strongly, especially Kindilien. Even when she’s not painting the great Paul Cezanne‘s home turf in Provence, that artist informs Kindilien’s finely executed landscapes.
“Wheat Field in Provence,” oil on panel
Her houses become squares and her roads receding rectangles. In the best vantages, nature and geometry in Kindilien’s work somehow make me think of physics and things Einsteinian that I don’t understand, though the truth of it is somehow reaching out to explain itself to me.
Hot and cold, painterly and subdued, abstract and figurative, emotional and cerebral. Not all paired exhibitions work nearly as well as these do, and I found myself popping in one and then back to the other, comparing and contrasting. What, I’m not sure. Maybe two different ways of looking and being in the world.
“Distant Lavendar,” oil on canvas
Does it matter that the fickle art world generally values most highly creating something that it perceives as new? Who ordained that inventiveness – which can often be ephemeral and not much more than novelty – is superior to homage excellently executed?
There will be a reception for Painted Tropics, Midwinter at the Lawn Club on Thursday, Feb. 5, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
