By JAMES W. THOMASSON

By JAMES W. THOMASSON

Rappahannock News Contributing Writer

Editor’s note: This review was scheduled to run in the newspaper's June 23 issue. However, because of transmission difficulties, the copy was not included in last week’s paper. We apologize for the delay, but felt that the review is still of interest.

Technique - the studied, practiced, steady and controlled use of color, shape and mood - is the lesson well taught by Lynnette Nicholas and J. Scott Robinson in their joint showing at Middle St. Gallery.

In the most positive use of the term, here are two fine technicians, whose style and method are clearly at the disposal of their aesthetic vision. And yet, how markedly different they are - at least at first glance.

Lynette’s delicate touches of color and texture create within the viewer a sense of the lyrical, mystical quality of the natural landscape, whether in the eruption of purple “evergreens,” fired red by the white-hot sun ascending in her “Indigo Sunrise,” or in those gentle stars that float above the treetops in the “Full Moon” print sequence, more like dew drops or sparkles of dust from some fairy’s wand. I had heard of those very stars before in Archibald MacLeish’s classic play J.B.: “Water under bridges opens, closing, and the companion stars still float there afterward...”

Still, there is an uneasiness, approaching foreboding, in these paintings. The handbill for the show fronts her work as “watercolor light transitions/landscapes.” They are that. Yet, these landscapes, with their balanced composition and texture, betray the artist’s sense of uncertainty and anxiety in the very transitions of light and color that identify her work. That same sun from “Indigo Sunrise” now peers through more subdued tones of muted orange and ochre in “Early Morning.” But there is the premonition of the day’s relentless heat. Stark trunks and limbs surge outward and upward to escape, leaving their leaves behind.

In “Rainbow Visions” the rain