The Color Of... 

May 25, 2018

By Carol Taylore-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. 

Poetry In Pictures

November 9, 2019
By Carol Taylor-Kearney 

Fran Lightman Gibson gave her exhibition the title, “If you need a place to go, take any road.” And as expected, she presented painterly landscapes where every color and every brushstroke, whether for ground or water or sky, directs your vision around, over, and through the painting. She has an interesting way of using her marks in that sky, while the water has a greater consistency of strokes, and land masses are made up of a variety of blotches and smears. What this leads to is a little different in each work. In After the Eruption, the image presented on the post card, the sky is a light blue at the top with whites along the horizon line. The changes in density and shapes of these colors makes it feel as if the sky is sweeping, reconfiguring itself. I suspect that the ground is made by an undercoat of yellow on which other colors like green, violet, sienna, and white are brushed over. This gives the land a shimmering quality of sun and heat.   

In Can’t Find My Way Home, Lightman Gibson gives us a strong directional in the form of a diagonal running from bottom right to mid-section left. There is clarity in this diagonal, but it runs off the frame, out of the picture plane. Above this, the strokes become more compact setting up mazelike blocks until they release at that horizon line and into the smoother air. Gazing at Pt. Mugu is created by a series of intersecting triangles—of sea and road, and vegetation, and mountain—augmented by the cloud-textured sky.   

Lightman Gibson has made additions to her oeuvre— she has added figures to her landscapes as in Quiero Esta Realidad and Venice Beach.  The figures are minimal and sticklike.  Compositionally, they don’t seem to add nor detract from the painting. Psychologically, though, they connect us to a world of real-life experience, making the scene less abstract and more document, less about paint and more about narrative. Her smaller works like Dream Baby Dream and Sunlight on Route 40 are so expressive in their paint handling and experimental with color that they induce you to go back to look at the other works for reinterpretation.  I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken”; a poem that is less of a lament or an encouragement of an untrammeled road but about the road that was taken (less traveled or otherwise), and how the choices of observation “Make all the difference.”