诗意的栖居——观凯瑟琳和芭芭拉画后
凯瑟琳和芭芭拉是美国西部优秀的艺术家,也是我的老朋友。
每次在西雅图,凯瑟琳几乎都会送我在她的花园里采摘的植物,有时是花草,有时是果核种子。凯瑟琳是户外写生画家,她以这种方式来传达她对自然的青睐,同时也将她的朋友很自然地带入到她的绘画世界。她说:“风景包涵了这个地方的外在世界和艺术家的内心世界。”因此,当她用水彩与色粉结合,以笔刷的每一刻滑动和快速的颜色变化中,生成了她那光斑四射的色彩语言符号,并由此转化生成画家内在情感表达的风格外化特征。
芭芭拉在她家族中排行老大,兄弟姐妹十个。孩提时代,父亲带她到香港旅行,在临界口岸,她的父亲指着内陆方向说:“那是中国大陆,很迷人,但我们不能进。”许多年之后,近60岁的她踏上中国大陆,开始与我进行十余年的交往,多次往返于武汉和西雅图之间。有时我会展看她赠送我的家族不同时段的合影照片,有趣而感人。她说:“现在在我的兄弟姐妹的家庭聚会上,这些活着和死去的家庭成员萦回在孙子和孙女之间,兄弟姐妹衰老的面孔反应在这些老照片上。”由此,她的作品撷取家族生活中的物件和场景片段,以她的绘画性的手法表达现状、气质和叙事性,从中可体现时间的持久性和短暂性,唤起人们对生命的感叹和对生活的热爱以及这种感受可持续的传递——在此以绘画艺术的方式传递。
她们的作品真实的反映出各自不同的关注点,不同的气质和风格,同时也反映出艺术家对人与人之间、人与自然之间的共同关爱。
她们的作品娴熟的运用水性色,以激情挥动的稳健笔触,分别以水性色的特性和水性色与色粉的完美结合,凭藉精良的纸质和色材,展现尺幅之间的深厚功夫与才情,可谓品鉴收藏之佳品。
Poetic Environs
Paintings by Catherine and Barbara
By Zhang Guanghui
Catherine Gill and Barbara Pitts are two distinguished artists from the Northwest United States, and personally, we have been good friends for many years.
Almost every time I visit Seattle, I receive plants as gifts from Catherine, from her garden: sometimes flowers and herbs, sometimes fruits and seeds. These gifts are an expression of her admiration to nature, but also a natural invitation for friends to join in a journey in paintings created by her, a Plein Aire painter. “The landscape embodies the outer world of the place and the inner world of the artist,” Catherine says. By combining watercolor with pastels, quickly with color changes, she registers what she feels with each movement of brush and ends up with her own marvelous language and symbolism of colors, where light spots shine around and where, in terms of art style, the outer traits come into being to truly convey the artist’s inner feelings.
Barbara has nine sisters and brothers and she is the oldest. In her teenage she once traveled with her father to Hong Kong. At the northern checkpoint, her father, with a finger pointing at the inland direction, told her “That’s mainland China, an amazing country, but we can’t enter it.” Many years later, in her very late fifties, she finally did. Since then, she has shuttled between Seattle and Wuhan many times and we have had a friendship for more than ten years. I have a present from her – an album of photos shot in different times of her family history, what is always interesting and touching to me whenever I look at them. About these photos, Barbara says: “Now, at family celebrations with my sisters and brothers, our grandchildren linger for living and dead family members, and we see old images played out on our siblings aging faces.” Both quotidian objects and life moments in these images are recaptured by Barbara into her paintings which address the temporal permanence and impermanenceof traits of appearances, of temperament and of narrative. Lingering over her paintings, viewers might be elevated to experience again the awe and love in life, and to gain awareness of a sustainable approach to pass such feelings on and on – here it is through painting.
Both artists have their own focus, temperament and distinctive style, but there is a common thread throughout their work: involving care for relationships among human beings and between them and the rest of nature.
Both artists exhibit a great mastery in applying watercolors and creating trenchant and solid strokes. Respectively by fulfilling the characteristic potential of watercolor and by combining perfectly watercolor and pastels, the two artists give full rein to their profound abilities and talents in the field of exquisite papers and pigments. All these together has brought to their worksuperior quality worth appreciating and collecting.