It
happens all the time. A travel magazine photo strikes
you like a thunderbolt. You want to fly away to this
place that bores into your psyche. A similar sensation
occurs when you see Linda Davidson's drawings of nature. .
Although her
graphite and encaustic forests, plains, water and sky
don't represent real places, they somehow make the
urge more compelling. These are not slapdash sketches,
but painstakingly created remembrances of "walking
across fields while doing nothing - then suddenly everything
strikes you at once." So Davidson says.
The intricacy
of trees, blowing wind, waving grasses and light blend
with sudden clarity. Davidson savors and revisits those
rare insights through her art. You can lose yourself
in her slices of silent nature - a tangled white-barked
alder forest, the sharp horizon line dividing brown
earth and cobalt sky, or the mist-enshrouded shore
and sky.
Davidson's large
paper drawings reveal her diligent labors, while the
square encaustic landscape series
appears deceptively simple. Their smooth-as-marble,
multi-layered finish is carved with dental tools
and filled repeatedly with pigmented wax. These works
focus
on a world of constant motion, like the blurred glimpses
of trees you catch while driving by in a car.
This is Davidson's
first Seattle show. A graduate of the Rhode Island
School of Design, she has lived and exhibited in London
and Rome.
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