Artists Nurtured By Nature

Diane Brown’s paintings are luminous fields of color, with gauzy flashes of light floating over textured, deeper hues. They feel elemental, images of water or fire, or perhaps visual depictions of strong emotions — maybe turmoil, maybe ecstasy. Whatever the case, it’s hard not to be drawn in and linger, to see what the depths of the image might hold.

Brown’s images are part of one of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art​‘s first shows of the fall, an exhibition by selected members of the New Haven Paint and Clay Club — Brown, Anne Doris-Eisner, Michael Quirk, Nancy Lasar, and Oi Fortin — running now at the Ely Center’s space on Trumbull Street.

In contrast to the dynamism of Brown’s large canvases, Oi Fortin’s pieces are exercises in simplicity. Fortin works mostly in monotype, a method of printmaking. One set of images in the exhibit is from what Fortin calls a ​“haiku” series, in which ​“I matched my minimalist works with classic haiku,” according to Fortin’s accompanying statement. In the Sabriel series, shown here, Fortin writes that ​“I explore curves, colors, and forms. The narrative in this series is a message of strong, feminine shapes.”

Downstairs, in one of the first floor galleries, Nancy Lasar’s paintings share a certain affinity with Brown’s in the use of light colors and dynamic composition. Lasar’s methods evolved over a period of years, as she switched from drawing on paper to drawing on canvas. But what drew her to her airy aesthetic?

“I’ve always been intrigued as to whether it’s a solid or a particle,” Lasar said, referring to, well, any object — appearing solid in our lived experience but in fact composed of atoms that are mostly empty space. It’s the stuff that can give a nervous chemistry student in high school nightmares, the idea that the only thing preventing him from melding with the chair he’s sitting in is the repulsion of electrons. For Lasar, however, the dichotomy is more a source of fascination. ​“Matter is not what you think,” she said. ​“We’re solid, but we’re interacting all the time.” Hence the shapes in her paintings that appear a little unstable, as if they could move and morph into one another.

With that attention to instability and motion, she doesn’t necessarily consider any of the paintings to be truly done? ​“It is possible that I could decide, ​‘I should add to that.’” Quoting artist Paul Klee, she said, ​“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”

In drawing inspiration from how we perceive reality, Lasar finds herself musing on the ways in which science inquiry and spirituality sometimes seem to connect. ​“Aren’t we in the age when science are spirituality are confirming each other — at the same time that we’re on the verge of extinction? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” She said it with a wry smile.

Lasar’s finding inspiration in nature connects her work to that of Anne Doris-Eisner, in an upstairs gallery. ​“I am inspired by the resilience and transformative beauty of the land above and the supporting rock beneath. In the natural world I have seen that what is struck down, crushed, cut or splintered is not destroyed, but rather remains and carries on even though transformed,” she writes in an accompanying statement.

Several of Doris-Eisner’s works are depictions of trees that have suffered some sort of blow that they then grow around and create new shapes from. ​“I’m inspired by trees that have evidence of trauma and have gone on living,” she said. She then shared her deeply personal story behind these ideas. Eighteen years ago, her son died at the age of 18.

“All of my art turned black,” she said. ​“No color.” Shortly afterward, she took up an art residency at Atlin, in British Columbia. She visitied glaciers and ran across ice fields, and saw all around her, as she writes in her artistic statement, that ​“the forces of stone, water, and ice, of uplift and erosion, were everywhere I looked. Mountains, glaciers, lakes and the vast spaces between them moved in a harmony of creation and destruction. The scenery was intensely beautiful and moving.”

For Doris-Eisner, it constituted a ​“breakthrough,” she said. She had been accustomed to working in watercolor, and in filling the page. Now she switched to bold lines and white space. ​“I’m really a mark maker,” she said. ​“It was a challenge for me to leave more negative space.”

But when she did, she saw the transformative capabilities in it. ​“There is power in the negative,” she said. ​“There is pulse and there is rhythm” — movement and life.

The exhibit runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., until the end of the month. Visit the Ely Center’s website for hours and more information.