Linda Davidson - Artist
Home Portfolio Words Contact
 
 
 
Review, "Blink of an Eye", continued
 
 
 
 

Some of Davidson's panels could have been excised from a Piero della Francesca painting; others, on close inspection, are patterned - a series of tiny blue circles, or the kinds of airy nautilus whorls you find in "eclectic" textile designs from the 1990s.

There's one panel that shows the sky as a cluster of white contour-map-like curves imposed on an undifferentiated blue background, and this is an attractive theory, that the sky only looks flat but is in fact full of various volumes. The effect of stepping back from close inspection tells you that the sky in reality - never mind painting - is inherently Impressionist, a mass of vapors willfully organized into a snapshot.

There's intellectual and sensual pleasure in Davidson's sky, but Ken Fandell's work is like a delirious sock to the sternum. His large-scale photographs have an intense painterly quality, largely because more than anything they recall the kinds of ornate, cloud-filled sky paintings that fill the domes of Baroque cathedrals, the kind of sky that announces the presence of God but also allows the painter to show off a little.

What Fandell has done is to photograph the sky multiple times from a single point over the course of a few days, and then montage them together. The result is a massive, impossible sky that gives you no sense of direction or gravity, with light coming from everywhere and an airy feeling of weightlessness.

 
 
 
 
read "Landscape Revisited" review