Lowry said her cuts or reliefs are getting deeper and deeper.
Rebecca Lowry grew up around a contractor dad and carpenter brother and others who struggled with wood. She vowed to do something different and became an economist. Ten years passed.
Then one day as she was painting on wood, she cut into it. She hasn’t looked back.
Lowry’s painted-wood reliefs — or as she terms them “carved paintings” — are featured in the latest exhibition at the cooperative City Gallery on State Street.
Artist Photo
“Hide here with me,” oil, acrylic, and wood collage, by Rebecca Lowry.
Her works and those of Meg Bloom, Jennifer Davies, and Kathy Kane, with whom she shares the exhibition, have cozy and cute titles like “Hide here with me,” “Bark marks,” and “Moving in with you.”
The four-woman show has a bland title “New and Old.”
The show is anything but.
“Algae,” acrylic on board, by Kathy Kane.
“New and Old” brings together four artists whose varied works in wood, paper, canvas, and collage, both as painting and sculpture, suggest a voracious, dangerous natural world, full of precipices and cutbacks, gooey sticky swamps of color with hidden green monsters, wounds barely sutured, shark spines, and in general dangerous places.
But it’s safe to visit, through Aug. 4. Gallery hours run Thursday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. On July 28 at 2 p.m. Lowry will give a talk about her work at the gallery.
Lowry also made the “cut” as the newest member of the 18-member cooperative gallery, which got started in 2003.
“I’d been resistant to being an artist, because I’ve seen how hard it is,” said Lowry. After majoring in economics while taking several studio courses in painting, the Smith College graduate went to Africa. She said her aim was to see how not-for-profits there worked, not to absorb the colors and carving techniques all around her in Botswana, where she spent a year.
Several viewers at Saturday’s opening reception nevertheless sensed Africa her work.
The painter/carver herself called attention more to the presence of textile patterns.
“I’ve always painted on wood,” she said. One day when the knife made the cut, as if on its own, she had a light-bulb moment. “I said, ‘Why didn’t this happen sooner?’”
If Lowry cuts while painting, Davies (pictured) places bandages of paper and sutures of thread over a kind of geometric wound created by empty space in the middle. The store-bought little frame serves as a loom in her series called “Tea figures, 1 – 5.”
“Mine [my art] is about using the processes of crafts — weaving, sewing — in a fine-art context,” she said.
“Tea figure 2,” paper and thread, by Davies.
Using among other materials fine Japanese paper pulp, she said, she brings the considerations of painting such as contrasts and volume to the consequences of craft forms like weaving.
“I have no interest in sewing anything useful, except the occasional mend,” she said.
Beware the Matza Shark
Bloom’s “Acantha,” handmade paper, pigments, silk, wax.
Meg Bloom, the only sculptor in the show, has created a scary horned mask that might also make you think of the primitive although it invited touch like a large clumped paper towel.
It abides on the wall above “Acantha” (pictured), an icthyological form splayed open showing an imposing spine. Art-viewing visitors at the crowded opening stepped gingerly around it.
I associate paper with linen and softness. In the hands of these artists, who suture it, pull it through hot wax, singe it to give Bloom’s sculpture perhaps the look of the world’s only shark made of matza, the result is energetic and dramatic, even a touch violent.
“I love burning things,” said Bloom, a former potter whose underlying interest seems also to be in capturing the moments, whether in nature or artificial creation, of transition between death and regeneration.
Even Kathy Kane’s acrylic on board “Algae” (pictured) made me think twice about visiting Young’s Pond in Branford, on which the work is based.
Kane said she prepared her work in watercolor sketches en plein air. She said these were tranquil, quiet moments when she could pay loving attention even to the pond scum. But when she got back to the studio where the sketches evolved into a full painting, the final product on the bottom left has floating green creatures reminiscent of the giant squid that attacked Captain Nemo’s sub in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Lowry is participating in a concurrent exhibition about works on paper at the Jeffrey Leder Gallery . She’s showing four paper pieces based on rubbings made from the carved paintings.
That show too runs through Aug. in Long Island City, New York.