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  Judith Linhares
Reviews
  Art on Paper
Working Proof

By Faye Hirsh

Art on Paper, May/June, 2003


Judith Linhares has just completed another in a series of monotypes at Cheryl Pelavin's workshop, this time a group of nine flowers and one ship. Five in the series were printed as ghosts and then hand worked in watercolor. Her last show of oils at Edward Thorpe Gallery in New York was mainly of flowers; the ship is a new theme and relates to a large painting the artist recently completed.

Linhares has always been fasinated with fairy tales and is presently teaching a course at the School of Visual Arts in New York on the subject. For her "the way the flowers escape looking like something from Good Living magazine is that they are so animated and alive and speaking to one another. In fairy tales the ants talk, the porridge pours over, and everything else. Disney does that really well." It seems any one of the yellow flower discs of the daises generously clustered in a blue vase in one work might at any moment unshutter hidden eyes and open an invisable mouth-but Linhares does not resort to anything obvious. For they are, in a way, personified. The animation resides in the brillant colors, active arrangements (usally many of a single species), and fluid, rollicking strokes. Among the yellow roses highlighted in orange, a few exuberantly stretch their fullblown blooms against the dark purple ground, while others wither and fade, some never having made it far enough to blossom. It's a colony with internal social relations. Like so many of the vases, this one is translucent, allowing for some coloristic virtuosity to be indulged. Asters bulge, roses droop, and tulips sparkle above a star-adorned vase. It's a most vivacious display.

"Although I buy flowers about once every ten days or so," says Linhares, "I didn't bring any to Cheryl's. Instead, I brought some little gouaches and paintings. So they are have done from life and half from memory. Whatever is good for the painting. When I first started them, I went to the flower market and bought $300 worth of flowers. It started with actual flowers, but I need them less and less." She likes the scale of the monotypes, their immediacy, and the fact that she gets to go to a workshop and be with other people, a break from the solitude of the studio. "And I'm interested in monotypes that feature the brushstroke." Nowhere is that more evident than in her one ship, a four sided schooner that clips along through multicolored waves beneath a tutti frutti sky. But, as Linhares says, "It's more the idea of a ship. A bit of it is doing a souvenir painting." Indeed, the vessel does resemble something you might find in a bottle rather than riding the deep or even the surface of a classic seascape. Like the flowers, the ship has a fantastical life that has strayed just outside reality into a world emptied of human beings, yet filled with a singularly playful consciousness.