Review –

The Color Of...

May 25, 2018

By Carol Taylor-Kearney

When I first went through the exhibition spaces of the Cerulean Arts Collective Galleries this month, I thought I would be writing about color. Fran Lightman Gibson, Jeanne O’Shell, Jack Ramsdale, Stephanie Rodgers, and Ruth Wolf are definitely artists on the side of the “Colorists.” That is artists who allow color to be a strong, even dominant, feature in their artwork. But there is more to each artist than just their chroma.

At the doorway into Fran Gibson Lightman’s space, I was thinking about the landscapes of Paul Cezanne, so many greens and yellows, blues and whites. But the green here felt more acidic and the organization was less patches of interwoven color than sweeps of exuberance sometimes even moving in a counter direction. The paint could be applied in relatively thick strokes and sometimes so thin it was like looking through to a stained canvas. Many of the compositions began, at the bottom (or foreground), as a void of warm sand moving up to calligraphic slashes of green (sometimes with other colors), resolving in the horizon, then devolving into the blue and white of the sky. I say, “devolving” because nothing in these paintings dissolve or dissipate. They are very present and full of emotion and spirit. I think of Fran Gibson Lightman as the abstract expressionist of the landscape. In this she is a kindred spirit to Joan Mitchell, telling us that Nature is full of vim and vigor.