ART COMMENTARY: Tara Smith & Jessica Hess, Painters

Tara Smith is the curator at the Oceanside Museum of Art, and exhibits paintings at Subliminal Projects Gallery - impressive that she has time to be a productive artist too.  And what a vista to straddle: judge and creator. 

I am drawn to the forward narratives that are a lucid, available, and responsive synthesis, the poignant tandem emotions that arise, and what appears to be exquisitely painted surfaces in her work. (I have only seen internet reproductions.)    

In Untitled (Chopper) I smile and then cringe  at the "helicopter mom" concept and then continue to mull: the Diebenkorn mist that descends to the innocent child could be the wings of his guardian angel, a toxic cloud, or a comment on modern surveillance and intrusions into privacy.

The sweet child plays with a toy that within Smith's image-world, could be a mechanical Shiva - it grooms and saves,and destroys and creates with amoral and over-determined intention.  

What is that yellow-bumble bee section of blade?  I'm musing.

In a recent email conversation, Ms. Smith responded to my questions; she "...loves the balance of subdued color with bright shocks of color."  About the meaning of Untitled (Chopper), Smith wanted to leave it "... up to the viewer and what life experiences each person brings to the work." Interestingly, she said "... that right after I painted the work I felt more doom and now... months from the time when I finished it, I see the work completely differently." 

Jessica Hess

Jessisca Hess, Eureka - Day

 Jessica Hess's subject is pervasive subversion using the symbiotic and parasitic nature of graffiti as symbol. Objects are painted with a saturated photo-realistic style, which at once contains, appropriates, expands use, then denies graffiti by celebrating real figurative painting. I am struck by the elegiac quality of certain works, while others are brash and intrusive.  

Malcom Morley,  Ocean Liner,  1960's

I had to think again about Malcom Morley, whose 60's hyper-realist paintings of crashing airplanes, heroic pilots, and glamorous ocean liners celebrated and questioned the result of 1930's faith in modern engineering and the new globalism - each feat with fewer degrees of separation between nations' contradictory economic development.

I remember too, how much I loved the childrens' books and toys my brother and boy grandchildren were given and played with so diligently,their male gender identity transmitted to them by cultural osmosis.

I especially loved the Tonka book, with its beautiful illustrations of the power of constructive construction and the benefits to us all.  

Luckily, my working mother never tried to shape a female gender identity by forbidding me to play with my brother's toys,  and my generous little brother let me play with his beloved Lionel train set.     

In Galactic Gobbler, 2009, the eerie glow and beautiful menace of a deathly black truck forever enters your personal boundary, its wheels and weight crushing what seem to be small red night driving indicator flags, indiscriminately. 

In fact, in an email Ms. Smith explained that they are brake lights on a freeway, and was thinking about Peter Doig, one of her favorite artists when she painted the last 3" of the work.  (One of mine, too.)

Yet abstract qualities of space appear in varying degrees in the works integrate the figurative composition; in fact I think they are the more compelling experience. It'd be facile to overlook the particular beauty of the painting as one chills with beauty-fear over the subject matter.

  Road Kill Series
   

I have not felt such a pain when I viewed this painting since I looked at Annette Messager's crocheted shrouds for dead birds at LACMA in the 80's. 

The familiar and cherished poetic insight about "noiseless patient spiders", "flowers in crannied walls", and "the fall of the sparrow" all came to mind with such impact and poignancy, and then a kind of dreadful acceptance, the "formal feeling" that one must live with.    

The theme continues the theme of the forsaken and abandonment with paintings of discarded stuffed animals.  After the Newton school massacre, town officials had to rent a warehouse to hold all the stuffed animals that Americans sent to them in a effort at consolation.  

Teddy Bear - Sam

I have admired Beth Van Hoesen's stuffed animal paintings for some time.  They convey the same sense of childhood loss that I encounter in Teddy Bear - Sam, but the painting technique seems so different.  Van Hoesen's images find the tactile appeal of a stuffed animal, increasing it's intrinsic attractiveness.

My dear mother-in-law, in an assisted living facility, plays with a stuffed animal during the day, and when my own mother died, the hospice chaplain gave me a sweet little bear dressed as a gardener.

I was puzzled and wished that the pain I thought so private wasn't and then flipped to a welcome gratitude that I was so fully perceived.    

Smith also deals with spatial issues in more abstracted compositions, and they seem to retain their California light and air landscape quality. In this intriguing landscape a great white cloud that is perhaps mechanized rests upon dark woods with coffin-like caves visible below ground.

But it's the deep closure I get from its lyrical composition of space, shape and color that drew my attention first and last, and not the narrative that presents itself more subtly than in other works.

I look forward to future work from these two painters.