Visual Art at Centrum

The Via Media...in Vegas, baby!

This summer, the Episcopal/Anglican church is holding its every-10-years-lets-review-ourselves Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, while a separate conservative group of mostly African and South American Anglicans are meeting on their own in Jerusalem as a protest against the western church's acceptance of homosexual pastors. These separatists feel the need to fight against the serious problem (as they see it) of homosexuality before it takes their church over.

Because, really, what is faith without sex?

And what is Vegas without faith?

As I wander in boiling Sodom (a lovely 107 degrees outside, but who goes outside?) looking at the overweight casino men praying on a good hand, and at the sparkly hookers adorning those men, I find myself wondering yet again about why people need what they do, and about what awful things can spring from expressing those needs.

On a scale of visual awfulness, the local art in Vegas is fairly high up there. There are on display showgirl fantasies in soft oils, bright digitally enhanced blobs of color printed on canvas, over-bright photographs of Strip kitsch, and shiny copper paint on boards that express the artist's "abstract meanings". The hotel art is mostly color blobs or forms generated in what I imagine is the Vegas Discount Abstract Hotel Art Factory (Free Gold Leaf with Bulk Framing Orders!) The restaurant art can be sensuous (cleavage, ass, ripe red peppers that look like cleavage...or ass), making dinner a mental cacophony of Freudian half-theories. One attempt to enhance the accessibility of "real" art here, the Guggenheim extension at the Venetian, closed due to lack of interest more than a month ago.

So, one is left to people watch and to wonder about needs and what they get you into. The need to express oneself as an artist in such a completely imaginary place seems to result in rather cheesy, rather conservative artwork. The expression of other needs - - to gamble, smoke, screw, drink, what have you - - all take place in a city that is cleaned, pressed, repaired and repainted each day in readiness for the next night's happenings, so one can never actually see the results very clearly.

And that is the power of conserving the norm, of maintaining a public "middle way" in Vegas. Seeing it in action it is truly remarkable. It is Westworld, it is Victorian England, and there are no consequences. You just go on and do what you do, whatever that need may be, and we will work to maintain the slot-machined-filled communal order that allows each to his own. The placid subject matter of the art will not offend, either.

In Canterbury, they will be wringing through what they believe regarding homosexuality, and in Jerusalem the offended Anglican separatists will be shouting out against it - - but participating in both meetings will be gay pastors, and polygamous pastors, and adulterous pastors. Silent pastors.

It seems the separatists are forcing the church to act in alignment with specific thoughts about sexuality, and the sacred. Yet Anglicans have built the modern church on the idea of the via media, the idea that public lives and actions should conform to the church standards, but that conformity of thought is not required.

Over time, of course, one infects and informs the other...resulting now in a stated need that the church narrow itself to align with historically/socially accepted norms, that participants in the church all think the "right" way. And so it is in Vegas - - with all the shiny and color and hypnotic casino bells (and belles), everyone winds up thinking Vegas, and praying in the same way everyone else does, sooner or later.

Necking in San Francisco

Aberdeen, Washington's other artistic native son, the photographer Lee Friedlander, has spent his long career capturing people doing what they do, especially when they are unaware of their doings. He shoots the moments after events, the reflections, side angles, shadows. He shoots the rhinos humping at the zoo while onlookers stand anxiously waiting for something more zoo-like (and please, less animal-like) to occur. He shoots the last hour of the cross-country road trip, the last act in the street parade.

His recent retrospective, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, showcases Friedlander's almost pathologocal social voyeurism. And it showcases his fascination with that most awkward and vulnerable of our human parts, the neck. The vantage point in many of his photographs is that of a dog or a child; he shoots from what seems like the subject's knee level, and shot some of his self-portraits from this up-body stance as well. Its a funny angle. But Friedlander is a funny guy. His shot of 1980's cubicle workers in a Boston office is hilarious, revealing coiffed professionals in nice office clothes sitting and staring blankly at the computers in front of them, as if these strange new machines are holding them in a force field while slowly sucking every thought from their brains.

Friedlander gets close enough to touch, in his engaging images, and stays just far enough away to let us see the strange and the goofy. Which meant that for this viewer, seeing his show at SFMOMA was disconcerting. That angular, segmented museum space is filled with offputting dark corners and sharp edges. It felt cool, pretentious, unwelcoming.

I recently bought The Architecture of Authority, by photographer Richard Ross, and found myself (to my own dismay) mentally noting, as I wandered SFMOMA, all the integrated control systems in this supposed center for artistic and intellectual exploration. I would expect that of, say, a jail or courthouse, or even an airport, but not a civic museum space.

And then I went to see the artwork at the San Francisco International Airport, and my head got turned completely around. First off, I saw work on display in the small and quiet SFO airport museum and library by Herb Lingl, the aerial photographer (who prefers a far loftier vantage point than Friedlander.) Lingl's crisp, highly saturated photographs of the Baylands restoration in Sonoma and of SF Bay salt ponds were creepy and offputting, but where they were displayed was anything but. I completely lost time in the contemplative museum space.

I also saw an installation at SFO of sculptures of the Buddha, about one dozen sculptures created in various centuries and from various Asian countries. The installation was just feet from the security lines in the International Terminal, yet it was quietly mesmerizing. The airport people-watching was also delicious.

But, back to necks - - I ended the day watching John Edwards not really stick his neck out for Barack Obama (as it seems the nomination fight has been called) on a big screen television in a hotel lobby while chatting with Milton, who was on his way from Yosemite to an elderhostel up on Orcas Island. And after talking politics for about 20 seconds, Milton volunteered to me that life is about protecting yourself from vulnerability, about covering your neck, and that was why he usually carried a gun while at home in Arizona.

Milton said there were three kinds of people in the world: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. I was (obviously, since I am female) a sheep, and he considered himself a sheepdog/protector of the flock (see above: gun carrying). He was on the fence about Obama, because he was not sure how Obama would be on torture. Then Milton asked me very directly if I would waterboard someone if my husband's life was at risk. I kid you not. I tend to have these kinds of conversations with people, where they reveal and revel in the philosophies they have hard-baked for themselves.

Needless to say, when I stuck my neck out and told him that I was an artist and painted abstract oils, he quickly defined me for me: "Oh, ya mean those paintings where you can't tell what they are about just by lookin' at them? I just don't get that."

Right back at ya, Milton.

Consolation Prize

Agatha Christie wrote a a funny piece of dialogue in one of her very early books, a quote I like to re-read often: "A man who has shot lions in large quantities has an unfair advantage over other men." Just so. Another favorite quote is from a play by Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning, where a character pleads "When I think of myself, I can scarcely believe my senses! But there it is - - all my friends tell me I exist." This can be a doubtful proposition, as personas shift in differing contexts, and who you are (or what your work is) to others is morphed by those very others. This kind of thinking smells metaphysical after a while, and that is not my intent; I just am engaged by the way a mind attaches itself to an idea, or vice versa, and like so many other creative types, I dig painting about that.

Christie wrote her characters as absolutes, which is precisely the comfort and the appeal of her mysteries. It is a relief to read about known and unchangeable qualities in (fictional) others, a true mental relief. Because engagement in our here-and-now belies that. Sound bites change perception, and character is splayed out on cable shows, one relentlessly morphing interview at a time.

The pleasure of painting, by contrast, is the pleasure of a completed internal conversation, at least for the artist. I loved seeing the RBC Canadian Painting Exhibition at the Emily Carr University in Vancouver last fall for that reason; it was a room of finished thoughts expressed by young, emerging Canadian artists. The thoughts varied, of course, and some were more challenging. Some were pristine. The acrylics by Elizabeth Grant I found particularly compelling. But funnily enough, Arabella Campbell, the winner of the competition, had a lot of nothing to say about the nothing that inhabits a lot of art. Her winning composition presented the structure beneath a painting. It was also seemingly about the inner state of nothing that often precedes the work (because honestly some of the best stuff comes from a blank mind) and the blankness you are left with after you get a composition out of you and onto canvas.

What struck me as funny is that compared to the other work in the show, Campbell's did not take me anywhere other than where I was - - namely, in a big white room at Emily Carr looking at (or in this case for) paintings. I thought her work was silly and pleasing, as if the painter herself was somehow like the Fry character, being assured of her existence through others telling her there is something to her, since her senses are unreliable. The idea she seemed to want the viewer to attach oneself to was not self-awareness, or the wonder of creativity, or even the basic comprehension of the structure of a painter's canvas. The idea my mind attached to, upon seeing Campbell's work, was that she is an artist who thinks very easy, knowable, concrete things.

And no, I am not going to follow that with a Seinfeld-esque "not that there's anything wrong with that" sentiment. There is something wrong with that, especially if your compatriots in the same show are grappling with ideas like the fear of overloading oneself with sensory experiences, or the eeriness of nocturnal suburbia, while also displaying dexterity with paint and color and some intellectual discernment. I don't perceive that a work of art does anything much in and of itself, but it is good when you as the viewer can find in the work evidence of that artist's internal conversation - - or an idea or image to attach oneself to, an attachment that lingers after the viewing, and changes one's own mental lineup.
 

Believing and Seeing

On those days where words matter so, like the days leading up to an important primary election, for example, art takes a back seat. Or so it seems.

And then...the Latrobe, PA flag-pin questioner at the democratic debate last week appears, an archetype, a woman-as-art-piece...and the artfulness of the public theater of politics is front-and-center once again.

For me, watching Nash McCabe ask her question of Obama was much like my visit to the art exhibition called "The Believers". I saw this exhibition last summer at Mass MOCA, and found it both repulsive and oddly familiar. For so many artists, deducing the workings of a mind is an agony. And the pain expressed in "The Believers" was palpable, not just in the subject matter (screeds on body mutilation and religion, schizophrenic musings, the essence of witch-ness, glorious imagined machines, the strange connections between all happenings) but in the artists' raw and compulsive need to categorize their own feelings, sexuality, thoughts - - and to in turn be categorized and comprehended by unseen audiences.

They strove to express and be known through symbols that formed a framed, articulated stance on Life's Important Question (whatever the artist determined that was.) Overall, the work in the exhibition seemed to me to be about the need to be identifiable, to self-describe in order to be known by the stangers who encounter these expressions of belief. To have their belief solidly seen.

On the other side of Mass MOCA, running at the same time, was an exhibition by Spencer Finch ("What Time is it on the Sun?") which conveyed the opposite. His installations explore other truths - - that light is tricky, that comprehension is subjective, and that memory (as in the hilarious and sad multi-piece "Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat") is specious. What you can and think you know, what you recall, even how you see color, Finch seems to say, is ever-changing.

Questioner Nash McCabe, belongs squarely in the camp of "The Believers". She knows what she knows, and it is constant. She feigned a vetted question about patriotism (and what is today's definition of that exactly?) when what was churning underneath was something else. Something about an unspoken shared comprehension she desired. Something like: "I don't want to challenge your humanity, Senator Obama, but how can you expect me to vote for...a black man? I mean you look nothing like anyone I would ever want to know, and in the privacy of my own home I say terrible things about you because you are not white like me, so how can I comprehend your mind - - but I will frame all that as a question about a symbol, since we all see a symbol in the same way, don't we?"

Staying Sweet

The crazy-long 10,000 page ‘enormous theorem’ (a massive algebraic proof categorizing simple groups) is a mathematical method for analyzing abstract and physical systems that have symmetry.

In mathematics and physics, symmetry is “a transformation or rearrangement of something that leaves it unchanged…The theory of relativity says that the transformation from one observer's point of view to another's may alter the values of some observations but will leave the laws relating those observations unchanged.” Perspectives change, but the song remains the same.

The enormous theorem identified all the mathematical building blocks from which all groups can be constructed, with the exception of 26 simple groups that did not fit into the theorem’s identifiable patterns. Thanks to this intellectual feat, “the principle that any fundamental physical theory must possess certain kinds of symmetry has become a scientific axiom.” 

When Daniel Gorenstein, the father of the enormous theorem, published his work in 1982, mathematicians and academics around the world were immediately enthralled. And some immediately connected Gorenstein’s work with…God. One of the quotes I saw at the time was from a professor who said that to him, the enormous theorem was like the first proof, a balanced and beautiful geometric proof that God may have written as he was test-planning the creation of the universe.

About 1300 years before Gorenstein and his collaborators published their theorem, this symmetrical image was created to honor both St. Matthew and God (who apparently was the universe’s first geometer.)

The image is from the Lindisfarne Gospels, an illustrated manuscript created by an early Christian bishop at the Lindisfarne monastery (the creepy ruins of which, located just off the Northumberland coast in northeast England, I have had the pleasure of wandering around.) The manuscript served to honor and preserve the ideal Christian church in a hostile world full of crazy Celtic pagans and invading Vikings.

As with any religious text, the author of the Lindisfarne Gospels followed church-sanctioned rules in his choices of script and illumination, symbol and illustration, many of which were also evident in Roman codexes written 100 years earlier. These rules of presentation placed an incredible value on visual symmetry and balance.

Taken as a whole, the illustrations in the Lindisfarne Gospels offer up their own visual ‘enormous theorem’ on how one should systematically convey (early Christian) religious experience, which is guided by unchanging laws and…symmetry.

Francis Collins is a scientist (now author of a book on God) who recently claimed to have found proof of God through Collins’ research on the ‘beautiful system’ of the human genome. This solid proof finally came to Collins many years after having a revelatory moment when he was hiking in the Cascades here in Washington. On that hike, he saw the natural ‘beauty of creation’ all around him and realized that denying a supernatural force was at work was, for him, now impossible.

Of course, much of the beauty (systemic, symmetrical or otherwise) that Collins saw around him in the forests of the Cascades was likely second-growth trees planted and regulated by Weyerhaeuser’s minions, but I digress.

This week law enforcement officers raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound in Texas, and the released 400 women and children living/held captive there. Daily life on the Texas compound (we now know from the victims) was as controlled and regimented an experience as prison life. Or monastic life. The women in particular in this FLDS church had to follow very specific rules, like not cutting their hair and marrying at puberty. The women were also admonished to not think, to not contradict or disagree with their religious leader/husband, or with any man, or any belief of the church -- they were to “stay sweet” in their minds and hearts at all times.

Francis Collins sees proof in patterns that God created the symmetry and beauty of the natural world and the beautiful symmetry of the human genome. The Lindisfarne Gospels offers us an instruction book for religious experience that claims to celebrate, through human artistic effort, the symmetry and balance of God’s ideal world. And a mathematics professor, reacting to the publication of a theorem that explicates the symmetry of most physical systems, claims it is an example of God’s prowess in geometry.

How these responses are any different than “staying sweet” is beyond me.

Scientists and those of faith who hit against something complex yet orderly claim that this symmetry is just more obvious proof of God. The enormous theorem, in actuality, conveys just the opposite: natural, physical, and abstract systems contain symmetry as a basic attribute and finding the random outliers (or 26 simple groups) beyond that pattern is what really should give us pause, or make us dig deeper, or spark creative exploration.

But of course forcing order in the face of complexity has always been a form of refuge, especially in art. And I find that however much I am a contrarian, I’m a little mesmerized by this kind of thinking, especially as expressed in the work of painter Rudolph Bauer (who composed a number of his orderly geometric drawings while captive in a Nazi prison.) 

Bauer and other non-objectivist painters seem to have used art to ruthlessly and consciously redirect their attention away from the chaotic reality of a world at war. And I see in their artwork something very like the Lindisfarne illuminations (and in the psychotic control in the FLDS church and in God-is-the-explanation scientists like Francis Collins) -- evidence of that act of human will it takes to contain all curiosity and critical thought.

To think sweet, to say God is the answer, to paint the geometry of a mind strictly contained and rigidly conforming to aesthetic rules...I can imagine these all serve a purpose, are perhaps part of assuring your identity’s survival. One can imagine finding refuge in drawing geometric shapes if one were held in a Nazi prison, or in drawing endlessly repeated knot patterns in a manuscript while utterly alone in a cold and dark monastery. But using the ceremonial majuscule script in the illuminated Gospels is akin to (and just as practical as) requiring all women in your sect to wear dresses. Seeing symmetry and geometry in science as mystical and proceeding from a creator being is akin to claiming that the regulated forms used in a non-objectivist painting actually give access to some spiritual power.

What makes my head twist on all this is the question of what is accomplished by these limits, by mentally or creatively “staying sweet’?

What is left when you get there? Entry to heaven for the select few? The promise of knowing something other minds do not? Seeing the hand of God in your very own scientific research? Claiming the supernatural in your own geometric patterns on paper or canvas?

How frighteningly, mind-numbingly narcissistic.

Considering Emma Peel’s Hairdo

In a scene in a recent chick flick, Hugh Grant’s character says salaciously that he enjoys painter John Currin’s work because it has “the perv thing.”  It’s a memorable moment in the otherwise forgettable film -- bad boy narcissist swaggers through a gallery filled with Currin’s overtly sexualized portraits of huge-breasted, wide-eyed women and sings the praises of his perceived brother in arms. It’s also an ironic scene, for those art critics who see Currin’s work as his indictment of our culture’s continual objectification of women. Grant’s character, apparently, just sees the breasts. 

People often try to identify, or identify with, an artist’s ‘thing’ - - their method or subject or mindset, and critics often ascribe motivation to artists, where there really is little evidence of its existence. Why Currin would choose to spend his working life trying to make the point that we objectify women by painting grotesquely exaggerated females that look just like all the women we see objectified in the media every day is a question only a critic can answer. As an artist, I think this critical assessment is a little off.

Currin has gained renown for his method as well as his subject matter. He mixes his own paints and preparations, using the processes of an artist from a previous century, and this ‘method thing’ adds to his appeal for collectors. He is a very successful painter. He also quite obviously is a bit of an obsessive and has some serious issues about sex and women that likely need working out. But I for one do not think he is presenting his images for a larger political or sociological purpose (and he himself does not claim to). Currin just seems to like to abstract and morph the female form and capture this in paint. Which is what painters do, after all; we use what we see, and we paint because it is what we enjoy. One could also say Currin visually prefers the abstracted and morphed female form and, much like Hugh Hefner, has made a living expressing this preference.

The need to know about an artist’s ‘thing’ seems to cloud the viewer’s perception of what they are actually seeing, and often clouds the context in which they are seeing it. I am still surprised at how often viewers of an artist’s work, including mine, get things wrong. I once had a studio showing where a visitor asked me, in all seriousness, to give him the nickel tour of the art history of my work - - who my influences were, whom I was most imitative of, what phases I had gone through, what phase I was in now. It was as if he had a standard artist questionnaire at the ready. A few years back at a solo show, a visitor asked her friend if she had seen my work before, and she rolled her eyes, sighed dramatically and said “yes, I know her, she's the queen of the palette knife”.  She thought she had identified my ‘method thing’.

Artists certainly comply with these requests and respond to these needs, because we tend to be sensitive types, or because for some, comprehensibility is a pathway to recognition. Regardless of how (or if) the artist responds, it is always the viewer who ascribes the ‘artist thing’-- usually for their own viewing comfort. And thinking about viewers ascribing and artists complying, and Currin’s objectifying of objectified subjects is what brings me to Emma Peel.  

Diana Rigg gained fame by playing this catsuit-wearing main character in the mod 60’s television series “The Avengers” and set a certain standard as the ever unattainable femme object (who was so very good with karate and car engines). As a female viewer, I tend to ascribe ‘things’ like vivid intelligence and savvy to the character, but know in truth Mrs. Peel’s purpose is simply to present a female as object, as is the case with many of Currin’s subjects. She too is an abstracted and morphed female form, exaggerated by her clothing and her preternatural ability to leap over high walls with the grace of a ballerina. Mrs. Peel also functions as lovely visual contrast for her partner, the utterly unsexy but very well dressed Mr. Steed.

As regards my own artist ‘thing’ and interpretations thereof, it turns out that I never actually use palette knives in my work. I use almost every other kind of object though, including my fingers, brushes, wallboard scrapers, spackle knives, and a ruler on occasion. And when I really see the female object Emma Peel, I think many things, but mostly I think about the object that matters in my world - - I see her teased and sprayed 60’s hairdo (such stiff hair!) and think “I could make a brush out of that.”

Tanner, Obama, and Wright

Henry O. Tanner was a hellishly good painter, and like Barack Obama, a barrier-breaker: Tanner was the first black man accepted into the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, about 30 years after the Civil War. His experience of the irrational racism so pervasive in America drove him abroad, however, and he spent much of his life painting in France.

Tanner is regarded as a mystic realist, a painter who preferred subject matter that was religious and frankly spiritual. He was a naturalist representational artist who also worked deftly with tone, light, and abstract themes, which is why I so appreciate him - - and why I thought of him last week as Obama tangled with race, Wright, and the media.

What I reflected on most last week was Tanner’s remarkable 1898 painting “The Annunciation”, which hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I visit his painting each time I am in that city and have a small print of it at home. So compelling is the image, I have been working lately on a response, on my own abstract interpretation of what I see in his canvas, in my studio. So too the news media - - and most sentient beings engaged in the political process - - have been working feverishly on responses to Obama’s abstract interpretations on race, racism, and the distinctions between his and Reverend Wright’s generational experiences of same.

Tanner was born just as the Civil War ripped open the country, and spent most of his youth in Philadelphia. His father was a well-known minister, his mother an escaped slave. That Tanner reached the heights he did creatively as a black man in post-war America is remarkable; that he had to go to another country to be recognized for his achievements is no surprise.

About eighty years later, Reverend Jeremiah Wright was born in Philadelphia and he spent his formative adult years navigating a post-war America as well, cementing his career in a country and a city shaped and defined by racial division. Barack Obama, in contrast, has grown up in a time of relative peace and in an amalgam of racial and cultural environments both within and outside of this country.

For me the intersection of their experiences connects vividly to what I see expressed in Tanner’s “The Annunciation”. 

It is obvious from his work that Tanner was truly devout and had a deeply Christian sensibility, and obvious from his life story that he was also acutely aware of perceptions of race. The religious story Tanner captured in “The Annunciation” is the moment when Mary receives the word from the angel Gabriel that she will be the mother of Jesus. She is portrayed, as many Tanner subjects are, in a natural setting; she sits on the edge of a bed in a small room hung with a colorful carpet, a room framed and decorated in non-western style. She is a small, young, obviously non-white-European version of the Virgin Mary. And, also like other Tanner subjects, she is portrayed as a humble supplicant, a Mary with no halo. The painting reveals that there is a force at work in Mary’s life, in her room in fact, that is entirely beyond her control or comprehension. This is the moment that she must consciously give up her free will, and she must give that will up to an unstoppable force. She was born into the arrangement, apparently; she has absolutely no choice; she is a slave. Faith must carry her. And I imagine faith is what carried Tanner through as well - - that, and a life abroad spent in more diverse and accepting cultures than our own.

Wright expresses his righteous indignation in his sermons, his absolute determination to be fiercely black and unabashedly Christian, in response to the unstoppable force of racism that has so permeated his life and the lives of his congregants. But he is also, in his way, a humble supplicant; he was born into the arrangement as well. He can’t be non-black in the embattled, segregated country in which he has lived. I appreciate his expressions of will against that force of racial division; his statements are a reflection of his life and faith experiences. Yet Wright is still not the driver of his own fate. Seen as a representative of his generation, of those who came of age as the fight for basic rights came to the fore in America, there has always been a force at work in his life that is beyond his control, that has been perpetrated upon him, that he has been challenged to bend and obey to.

Obama has been spared some of this, simply by the timing of his birth and his parentage; that he lands on the world stage almost 150 years after the Civil War and almost 50 years after pivotal Civil Rights battles were fought means his outlook is distinct from Wright’s, or Tanner’s. Barack Obama is also much less devout than either man. And that is where the connection is, for me as the viewer - listener - witness.

Tanner relied on his faith and expressed it through his work; Wright has made a living through direct proclamation of his faith. Tanner’s Mary sits awaiting her fate, powerless to stop it or change it; Wright rants against those who would demonize his race or his expression of faith, and yet the media make him powerless by doing just that. When Barack Obama spoke on race last week, and addressed his pastor’s opinions, he spoke as an intact, not-intimidated person. Obama spoke as a person whose path, future, and will were assuredly his own, not as reflective of one race or of one religious view. And, given that I am only a few years younger that Obama, I found his pragmatic perspective entirely familiar.

When reading Wright’s sermons, I think that his views make sense in the context of his life, which is of course different than my own but nonetheless comprehensible. His passion makes sense to me. When I look at Tanner’s “The Annunciation” I am profoundly respectful of both his painterly skill and of his beliefs, but I also see what I see because of what has shaped me. I am a white female with no religious inclinations whatsoever, a well-educated Generation X-er who is acclimated to a diverse world where capital is a greater force than faith.

And when I view Tanner’s Mary, sitting there helplessly on her bed, I see that what the painter has portrayed is the incredible force of fear in the abstract. He has painted the moment before a rape. It is a vivid, dreadful, real and intense painting of something Tanner knew and lived through - - absolute victimization.

Welcome Martha Carey to the Visual Arts Blog

I hope you'll join me in welcoming Martha H. Carey to Centrum's Visual Art site.

Martha is a visual artist and writer who has lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest for the last 7 years. She was born and raised in Connecticut, earned her BA at Carleton College, her MA at Simmons College, and undertook further graduate study at Temple University in Philadelphia.

She has shown her abstract oils on canvas in the Pacific Northwest at ArtsWest, VAIN studios, Forgotten Works, Patricia Cameron Gallery, PONCHO, Gallery 6311, and Oasis Gallery.

[Pictured: Parthian Shot, oil on canvas, 30in x 30in © Martha Carey, 2007]