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WILLAMETTE WEEK Visual Arts review by Richard Speer,
May 18th, 2005
A living treasure of the Northwest, Laura Ross-Paul returns
to Froelick with "Pattern and Illusion". a show in which she
further develops her figurative symbolist style. In many of
these oil-and-wax paintings, young people are linked together
in pairs by inscrutable energy fields. Two sisters hold hands
on the beach, connected by a spectral emanation vaguely in the
shape of a hoop skirt; perhaps they were sisters centuries
ago. In "Crown, a young maaaaan and woman join hands, a
gridded sphere radiating above their heads. Ross-Paul pulls
out one of her most brilliant Jungian tricks in "Circut,
posing two blond surfer dudes in a forest with arching
branches in their hands, forming a rough circle. And then
there are the lanky, shirtless twins who have modeled for the
artist for years, in this painting their baggy pants falling
below their boxers, staring out implacably as fields of
intangibles shimmer about. You wonder whether these portraits,
with their hip-hop fashions, their girls in belly shirts and
Tevas, will soon seem hopelessly dated by their sartorial
specificity. It's a risk Ross-paul, who used to paint timeless
nudes, is willing to take.
And the artist is at her best as a portraitist when she
adopts a neo-Impressionist languor, letting swaths of color
form a faces plans in the manner of Sargent. She's less
convincing when she turns more illustrator than painter,
working too hard to "get it right". The show's most stricking
work is "Head Gear", a head-and-shoulder portrait of a youth
suspended somewhere between boy-and manhood, sky and sea.
Myriad flesh-tones and blues break forth-poring out of both
the boy and the background-from a bank of pure luminosity
barely contained underneath. Despite their au courant
fashions, there's something refreshingly retro in the
sensibility of these images, an old school, if New Age, edict
that compells us towards the forces that binds us together.
"Only connect", wrote E.M. Foster in "Howard's End", "and love
will be seen at its height." (Richard Speer).
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