New Paintings

Catalog Essay 2005

The artist and environmental activist Allan Gussow thinks of landscape painting as "pieces of the whole environment that have been claimed by feelings". Dixie Friend Gay's landscapes are this and more, presenting a place and time inclusive of all that has claimed her passionate attention. Her extraordinary powers of observation create tableaus of images in which all is moving, active and expressed in terms of light, color, and brushstroke.

Gay is not concerned with copying or duplicating a particular scene; even her colors and light are strangely fictitious. Her paintings correspond imaginatively to what we see which is generally murky and variously shadowy in any case. These paintings manage to be, simultaneously, exactly what we see and feel. They connect only to things that we recognize but which also have qualities other than those we literally see. In this way they merge perception with emotional response, sometimes fusing the 'made up' with the 'real'. Because of this, Gay manages to diminish the gap between what the artist does and what nature is.

Colored brushstrokes manufacture her landscapes, weaving them into the physical tapestries that make up their larger environment. Throughout Gay's work one pattern moves into another-branches, roots, leaves, flowers, water ripples-ultimately creating an overall form that is both structured and chaotic. Her work presents a situation in which things are interrelated through a flow of movement, light, and color, tying one form to another.

Naturally, the question arises: why try to paint impossibly complicated or fleeting subjects from sight when you can use the camera? And from that arise other questions, like does painting from photography get us closer to the world or does it tell us mainly about the experience of photography? Gay's recent use of the digital photograph as an informational source for her paintings adds a sensuous, painterly flesh to the skeleton of the photographic source and also suggests realities beyond those of strictly visual experience.

Gay's work captures a particular moment: the instantaneous state of light and atmosphere, against the slower background of natural time. Painting with a deft, slightly brushy touch and with uncanny accuracy, she makes you feel that the time of the picture is still happening Gay attends to the world she depicts with a tenderness that is surprisingly moving. It's rather like Henry David Thoreau's observations about the constant cycling of nature, how the falling and death of leaves becomes the beginning of new life, and that nothing, in fact, is ever lost.

Kathleen Whitney