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These are unborn adults and there is a wonderful, hardto-pinpoint Alice-in-Wonderland feeling to the painting.
For me, it is the most successful rendering of a dream in the show, for it catches the quirky, skewed, upside-down, inside-out quality of dreams. In dreams, the imagination has a free hand and can do whatever it whimsically likes, and this painting gets that anythingis-possible feeling just right.
The last painting I wish to discuss is, along with the Blanche Doss Kennedy portrait, my favorite. It’s entitled “Dreaming, Above and Below,” and shows a young boy floating in a pool of water next to a tree in an otherwise open landscape.
In the daylight sky we see the Earth and, in the foreground, the Earth is cut away to reveal caverns and an underground spring.
This painting works for many reasons and I can only give a few of them. The boy is wonderfully drawn, and again, highly individualized (as anyone familiar with the Marshall family will realize). His body is in the kind of awkward pose that is only possible for the waterborne. There’s a loving attention to the details of this idly buoyant body and the face is angelically clear. The caverns of the foreground are so beautifully integrated with the rest of the painting that their impact is deliciously subtle, while the Earth up there in the sky might be mistaken for another heavenly body, softening the fantastical effect. The caverns and the distant Earth turn the painting inside-out, and we find ourselves in the boy’s head witnessing his dream.
The eerie glow of the sky and the lighting of the tree contribute to this transformation of a landscape into a dreamscape. Another moving aspect to the painting is the suggestion of a body floating in the uterus of Mother Earth. Here he floats, secure, peaceful, without a worry in the world, unborn and full of every dreamable possibility.
It’s a wonderful thing to see human bodies in pools of water, and yet how seldom has it been painted. Ma. Marshall had a great idea and she made that idea into a beautiful painting.
I urge everyone to see this interesting show. The show runs through April 28. Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Friday-Sunday. Ms. Marshall will be at Middle Street Gallery from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday, April 21.
(Editor’8 note: Charles Partington is a Castletem resident.)
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