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Art show review
She has a faraway look of someone whose mind has partially withdrawn from the world and whose eyes are fixed on things no one else can see. The garden over her shoulder is not outside the house in which she sits, but inside her mind. It is neatly painted with that crisp, dream-bright clarity that only exists in the imagination. We see the garden, her heaven, through her eyes.
Vision and annihilation are both there in her eyes. She is sitting in a house, but in her mind the door to her heaven has opened a crack and she is looking in. Ms. Marshall has a talent for seeing the Byzantine complexity of the human face, the urban center of the civilization that is a human life.
I find her landscapes less compelling. Of course, by its very nature, landscape painting is less charged with human emotion, and very few painters have ever succeeded in emotionally electrifying a landscape (Turner, Monet, and Degas, in his monotypes, are among the few).
I can’t help but feel that, in these pictures and in the spacescape paintings, Ms. Marshall is not tapping her talents. The stag that she uses in a couple of these paintings illustrates the point I’m making. There is nothing individual in this stag. It’s generic. It might have been lifted from a poster. It doesn’t resonate. Again, Ms. Marshall is not alone in giving us stereotyped views of animals - very few, if any, painters have painted living, breathing animals. This reflects a species-wide prejudice. Even such accomplished “nature” painters, such as Robert Bateman, give us the empty shell of stereotypes. All the squirrels look alike, and, as a consequence, one specimen can represent the species. Ms. Marshall’s human faces resonate in specificity, her stag is a cardboard cutout.
There is one painting in which this cardboard quality works to good effect. In “The Floor Cracked Open, Revealing Unborn Animals” we look down a hallway of a school to double doors marked “Exit.”
The concrete floor is cracked open revealing a frog and a rabbit. They are unborn but they are adults - the rabbit is not an embryo, and the frog is not a tadpole.
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