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By CHARLES PARTINGTON
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
Two weeks ago in the Washington Town Hall, in a benefit for Save the Children sponsored by the Middle Street Gallery and RAAC, a short but lively program of dance, song and story raised the spirits of an appreciative audience.
Written and directed by Laurie Marshall and danced and sung by Ms. Marshall and the dance group The Sunday Dreamers (Tutt Harris, Carol Lucking, Dancing Reed and Chris White), the program consisted of a series of loosely connected vignettes drawn from Native-American legends, personal recollections and individual dreams. The messages were upbeat from beginning to end.
On view at the Middle Street Gallery are the paintings by Ms. Marshall that were featured in the performance. I found it very helpful to have been given information concerning the characters, occasions and stories implicated in the paintings, although, after viewing them, I felt the best paintings didn’t require any additional information to be keenly felt.
Ms. Marshall’s paintings range from detailed portraits to fantastical dreamscapes. One very appealing painting, in fact, brings these two extremes together in a surprisingly interesting way. A small, two-panel portrait of her father opens to reveal snapshots of a dream he had in which he found himself holding light in his cupped hands and then returning that light to a river of light. The portrait is tellingly painted. Ms. Marshall’s absolute individuality is there in paint. The secret of doing portraits is in capturing the uniqueness that virtually every face posseses, and Ms. Marshall knows that secret. Older people have the best faces for portraits (and babies the worst) because so much of the civilization that every human being is shows up in the wear, the creases, and the patterns of wrinkles. A palimpsest of past expressions bleed through the moment in time.
Another portrait is even more striking. An elderly woman, Blanche Doss Kennedy, is shown sitting in a room. Over her shoulder and out the window we get a glimpse of a garden filled with flowers. The face is beautifully painted and, again, distinctly individualized - there’s no mistaking this face for any other. The eyes are especially well-painted, and in them we see a disturbing combination of hope and resignation and faith amounting to determination and yet a kind of vacancy.
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