July 18-31- Jinni Thomas-Traces of Aniquity
Artist reception:    Friday July 18, 2008   5-7 pm

JINNI THOMAS
Traces of Antiquity

SANTA FE, NM.  As a young woman, Jinni Thomas joined the art classes her mother taught in Italy. The ancient building walls layered with the history and romance of cultures long past left an indelible impression, as did her mother’s passion for gardening, which offered a serene retreat from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

Today, in an older neighborhood in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights, Thomas meditates on those pages of history, which she equates with the layers of petals found in the rose. More particularly, Thomas has identified that flower as the Renaissance rose, a floral motif that is the soul of her art.

Working in a second floor studio bathed in light, Thomas sequesters herself in what she describes as “a tree house,” draped by a 45- year-old mulberry tree and backed by four 30-foot Italian cypresses. The quiet, meditative space is conducive to the ritual of creating her mixed-media constructions on panel using Venetian plaster invested with acrylic pigments.

Thomas begins each of her artworks with mementos of the Renaissance rose, inscribing visuals or words in calligraphic drawings using charcoal. Then she starts applying thin layers of plaster with trowels or by pooling. Once a layer dries, she excavates the layer beneath it, using a variety of techniques, including sanding and solvents.  Areas of under-layers are revealed in a process reminiscent of yet another Italian term—pentimento, or the reappearance in a painting of a design or under-painting that has been painted over, especially after the painting has aged.

In Traces of Antiquity, several of the paintings include a layer invested with mother of pearl. “It has a translucency and luminosity that glows when revealed,” Thomas says.  She also embarked on a group of works in which she has played with gray as a “color or non-color. I thought about calling that group Gray Matter as an allusion to the memories enfolded in the brain,” she explains.

Like Venetian plaster walls that have a shiny surface which draws the touch, as though one's fingers would not stop at the surface, Thomas’ paintings are finished with a final layer of hand-buffed and polished beeswax. The effect is like a veil of flesh that harmonizes the whole while revealing the evanescent vitality within.

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Thomas explored art from the beginning, inspired by her mother who was a professor of art at Wayne State University. She received her bachelor of fine arts from Lindenwood College, St. Charles, Missouri, where she met her husband and left the Midwest’s luscious greens for the textures and colors of the high desert. Surrounded by layers of geology revealed in buttes and mesas, Thomas reflects on the cycles that surround her. “We’ve lived in the same house for forty years. Families have come and gone in the neighborhood, but traces of them always remain.”

August 8-21 - Pauline Ziegen
Artist reception:    Friday August 8, 2008   5-7 pm

PAULINE ZIEGEN
Bridging Horizons

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

SANTA FE, NM.  Pauline Ziegen’s earliest landscape paintings were done outdoors in Kansas where vast stretches of prairie lead to distant horizons. Representing the unique dichotomy of where the earth seems to meet the sky or the apparent boundary between earth and sky, the horizon is, she says, “an ever-shifting location that you can never reach, yet it is always compelling.”

At the time, Ziegen’s landscapes were representational; however, the plein-air process of capturing elusive light effects was one of the keys to what she does today. “When painting outdoors, the goal is to edit all that information into something that is meaningful—for me there is tremendous power in the restful yet aspiring horizon that both separates and unites.”

Ziegen has been “editing” ever since, creating suggestive abstractions inspired by the landscapes she views from a ridge-top home and studio on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “In a way, abstraction is all about editing and simplifying the visual world into formal elements that become metaphors of emotion,” she says.

A longtime fan of Eastern philosophies, Ziegen is drawn to the perceptual elements and materials of Chinese and Japanese art, including her use of gold leaf, which she combines with Old Master techniques of luminescent gessoed surfaces topped by glazes of gossamer oil pigments. “For this show, I’ve been studying the layered surfaces of woodblock prints, which are so delicate and sheer and yet substantive,” she says. 

Among the Oriental techniques that Ziegen has adapted is flattening space while suggesting depth. Using ephemeral darkened tones, such as those on the left and right sides of Sighing Sky (above),Ziegen explains that“the patina on the edges pushes the horizon into the distance. The tones glazed over the foreground reflect the sky as if the gold leaf were a mirror.” The result is spatial relationships that viewers create in their minds and hearts.

Ziegen’s innate sense of harmony and balance results in horizons that are soothing, calm, and orderly. To keep them from being too static, she introduces subtle yet energizing lines created with a pouncing tool that breaks her impeccable surfaces with small “dots.” Imperceptible in a reproduction, when experienced in person, the lines become provocateurs that grab the eye asking it to bridge opposites: the upper and lower registers, heaven and earth, the inner and outer worlds, being and nonbeing, and perhaps just as importantly, the landscape as perception and painted object.

September 12-25 - Kurt Meer
Artist reception:    Friday September 12, 2008   5-7 pm

tentative schedule