Exhibitions by a painter, a photographer and a sculptor use the natural world as a starting point, then render it larger than life through focus, ambiguity and intimation.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published May 11, 2003
[Courtesy Gulf Coast Museum of Art]
Margaret Ross Tolbert, Springs Diptych, 2003, oil on canvas.
LARGO - Artists Anna Tomczak, Barbara Sorenson and Margaret Ross Tolbert have in common their gender and their profession. Beyond that, they seem a disparate trio for exhibition at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art: Tomczak is a photographer, Sorenson a sculptor and Tolbert a painter. What they share is a preoccupation with small things that they translate into monumental proportions. It's not an easy trick.
Walk into the gallery devoted to Tolbert's paintings and you probably will suppress a gasp. These new paintings - so new you can smell the oil paint - are huge. A long wall showcases Springs for Hiram, a homage to her late teacher, Hiram C. Williams, a triptych stretching over 30 feet that calls to mind Monet's enormous Waterlilies panels. Paintings on the other three walls are only slightly smaller, and together they give viewers a sensation that cave divers must experience when they emerge from a dark recess and look up toward light filtered and refracted by water.
Tolbert's landscapes are part of a tradition begun in the late 19th century by artists such as Monet, who was perhaps the greatest interpreter of light as subject matter. But Tolbert is also interested in what's going on underneath, so along with luminous, thin washes of watery blues are murky mud colors and the suggestion of creatures lurking in the depths. Arranged randomly around the large canvases are small studies of water, some with wispy outlines of fish, that she calls a mosaic.
An occasional scratched mirror in the grouping frames our image against her big watery backdrops. It's a nice intellectual touch, a reference to Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his reflection in a stream and was turned into a water lily (which brings us back to Monet), in a show that's essentially an appeal to the sensory.
"Life is as simple as a photograph, and no simpler," writes poet Silvia Curbelo in wall text accompanying the exhibition of Anna Tomczak's photographs. Which means, of course, that it's all pretty complex.
Tomczak began using a large-format camera in the late 1990s, a camera so big, cumbersome and expensive that only a handful exist around the country. Tomczak books time on one, then, in a frenzy of creative energy, produces a series of one-of-a-kind prints using a process that directly transfers the negative onto smooth watercolor paper. The result is a saturation of deep colors that, combined with a double exposure of the negative using a flash and then a long shutter time, produces images in and out of focus, seemingly burnished by time and memory.
All are assemblages using flowers paired with a woman's hands or torso, or inanimate objects such as statues. Some of the most lyrical are the simplest, such as Blossom Freeze II, which encases flowers in ice and captures them in a blurry state of meltdown. The arrangements often suggest a vanitas, a kind of still life that became popular in the 17th century, celebrations of the natural world's beauty accompanied by reminders of its transience.
The photographs span six years, so viewers can see how her skill with the process has developed from year to year. Della Francesca's Bouquet III, created in 2001, and The Sun Cross from 2002 are hauntingly beautiful. But the later work, in which sunflowers are twined around an ornate iron cross, the Virgin Mary's is head backlit by a candle's aureole and the sunflowers' outlines repeat in arcs of light, goes beyond beautiful. It's a masterful composition that accommodates the serendipity of chance interactions with the environment and the printing process.
Sorenson's sculptures, grouped in the museum's courtyard, are not huge in scale, but they are massive in form. Her organic ceramics, embedded with stone, densely surfaced, sometimes look more like rock formations dug from the earth than clay.
But these are calculated works with specific references. The five "towers" of Caryatides II, with its undulating, curvaceous shapes and vertical orientation, alludes to the priestesses who served the goddess Diana and to the kind of "draped" columns that sometimes graced ancient temples. Sirens, as close to figurative as this sculpture gets, looks more carved than built up, a series of women's torsos that seem to emerge from rock piles. The figures also carry classical allusions in their poses and the layered, ridged slabs that form the bodies, simulating the pleats of Greek and Roman clothing.
Foothills is a satisfying little piece of symmetry, 20 gray-black squares arranged in a larger square, each like a three-dimensional sketch of hills and a valley. Together, they form a landscape as seen from an airplane window.
This is a good time to visit the Gulf Coast Museum of Art. In addition to these shows and selections from its permanent collection of contemporary Florida artists, its grounds are awash in blooming daylilies, a reminder that nature is the greatest artist of them all.
REVIEW: "Anna Tomczak: A Nostalgic View" and "Margaret Ross Tolbert: Springs Eternal?" are on view through June 29. "Barbara Sorenson: Monumental Ceramics" is on view through Aug. 29. The Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo, is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday. Admission is $5; free on Thursday. (727) 518-6833.
