Allan Appel Photo
Zallinger with “Now You See It, Now You Don’t,” acryllic and mixed media on canvas.
New Haven-born Kristina Zallinger had her last solo show in 1973 shortly after she received her MFA from the University of Montana. Then she lost time, lost a lot of it, to a long struggle with bipolar disorder.
In 2007 an art therapist at Fellowship Place handed her a canvas. “Go to town,” she said. And Zallinger did.
With impressive results.
Some of the results — on canvas — have just gone on display in in “Colorfields/Paintings,” her first solo show in decades. They are installed at the downstairs Azoth Gallery at the New Haven Free Public Library. They drew two dozen admirers, friends, and art appreciators at an opening Saturday afternoon.
“Warm Sky,” acryllic and mixed media on canvas.
The downstairs corner of the library, often a grayish enclave, is now as colorful as this gallery-hopper has ever seen a space.
It’s festooned with 21 paintings, all acrylics on canvas of modest square or rectangular size. They pack a powerful punch for the pupils.
The show runs during library hours through July 2. It is an eye-opener in two ways.
First there’s the pleasure and interest inherent in painterly work where you see the artist working out problems of perception and color.
Zallinger’s story of recovery from mental illness through art points also to the difference between work produced by art therapy and work produced by an artist who finally does get back in the saddle, bumpy as the ride may be.
“Colorfields/Paintings” is very much about the act of painting and exploring the medium in its terms; it’s not about expressing emotion — although there’s happiness aplenty.
In other words, art therapy helps get out emotions that are bottled up because of a breach in the psychological make-up.
Art usually emerges precisely from that breach, when the debilitating thickets are cleared away. If you eliminate the breach totally, it might be bye-bye, art.
As one admirer, independent curator Chris Butler (pictured), put it, “I hear jazz when I look at the paintings. They are very tactile, multi-sensory.”
Gallery curator Johnes Ruta selected Zallinger’s work. “She has both sharp focus as well as three-dimensional amorphous field in the same painting,” Ruta said. “Depth of field [a term used more conventionally in photography] is a big presence in her work.”
Between greeting folks, Zallinger spoke about pieces like “Now You See It, Now You Don’t”: “One of my goals is to take a two-dimensional surface like the canvas and make it into two, three, five dimensions, as many as I can get away with. Like sculpture.”
Zallinger said the art has also helped her self-esteem immensely. “I began my life again in 2007 [when the therapist said to ‘go to town’]. I began to feel good about myself by doing art again. My ability to produce something of myself that people admire.”
Curator Ruta, with “Rectangle.”
Zallinger said her father Rudolph Zallinger’s work — he’s the creator of the famous Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History dinosaur and other murals —is often invoked in relation to her.
She doesn’t mind.
“I’m proud of my father, but his art has nothing to do with” the struggle against bipolar disorder, she said.
Her dad, who died in 1995, was bipolar as well, she said. But the condition is no longer debilitating.
Chris Butler, who discovered Zallinger through the Azoth Gallery show, is featuring her in an upcoming exhibition. Called “Abstract Narratives,” it opens later this summer at Pop City, a gallery on Wall Street in Norwalk.
“Kristina is one of the stars,” Butler said.
“I see art as a hope, as a possibility to seeing into the future,” Zallinger added.
Then she went off to say thanks to a young visitor who saw green electricity in one of her works.