Eugene weekly., November 20, 2003, Page 42, Image 42

BY SYLVIE PEDERSON
Colorful Nature,
Minimalist Figures
Paintings by Satoko, Lindsay Kennedy
Satoko: Transience
White Lotus Gallery, Nov. 8-Dec. 16
E
ugene painter Satoko tells the story
of an 11th century Zen monk who
warned against colors because of
their seductive power. Herself under the spell
of color, Satoko admits she cannot stop
exploring its complexity in her paintings. Her
most recent watercolors and oils are inspired
by Tuscany, where she spends her summers,
drawn by the qualities of the northern
Mediterranean light.
Satoko gives us interpretations of
Tuscany — internalized cityscapes and land-
scapes whose elements, such as buildings,
are abstracted to their bare essentials.
Correspondence between those buildings and
their reflections or between trees and their
shadows is only partial, an apt metaphor for
the strongly evocative but ultimately inde-
pendent way in which those paintings reflect
the original landscapes.
“The beauty of nature is too great to be
recreated,” Satoko said. “The painting has to
be something completely different from what
you see. You can’t copy.”
To represent or evoke forms, Satoko does
not use line, nor does she strive to suggest
volume. She creates the impression of depth
through multiple layers of sheer pigmenta-
tion. Satoko’s physical and conceptual tool,
the key to her compositions, is color. Color,
and light, from which it is inseparable, are the
true subjects of her paintings.
Fundamentally a fearless but subtle col-
orist, Satoko uses a bold palette of red,
orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that
might turn garish or kitsch in less capable
hands. She works with water, pigment and
light to achieve luminous vibrancy and har-
mony. In Reflection on Water colors and light
appear to dance, precisely as if reflected on
water. In Moons and Suns, the abstracted ele-
ments of the painting — disks and cloud
forms — are involved in a slow, ethereal
dance, as if to their own music of the spheres.
Abstracted buildings constitute the only
hard edges in her work. With the circles for
moons and suns, they provide the only geo-
metric forms as counterpoint to the dominant
organic forms of hills and
clouds.
Water reflects both heav-
en and earth. In those
dreamy landscapes the verti-
cal order is subverted or
made irrelevant, even when,
as in Reflection #2, we can
tell where the divide occurs
between the landscape ele-
ments and their reflections.
All appear suspended in a
fugitive moment of time —
time captured in its very
passing, rather than as a
frozen image.
In the two oil paintings,
Passage and Nocturne, light
is also a crucial component, but it is now light
reflected off objects to which the medium has
conferred solidity. Although both the oils and
watercolors represent light, the watercolors
produce the illusion of light caught between
the layers of pigment, while the oils offer a
higher sense of grounding.
The passion the painter herself feels for
her medium and subject coexist paradoxical-
ly with a peaceful, contemplative element,
the painter’s mood. In the summer, Satoko
spends the early hours of the morning and
evening painting in the countryside. “It is
very important for me to be alone and sit on
a hill painting,” she said, “but also experienc-
ing the wind, smells, sounds. It’s a physical
experience that’s at the source of my paint-
ings, which are done in my studio.”
“Sunrise and sunset are the times when I
experience transience the most,” she
explained, “because I can see the sun mov-
ing. All the shadows of the clouds are visible,
changing constantly, dancing on the hills, like
the breathing skin of a living animal. That
moment, that hill, those shadows, will never
be repeated. This is what is called ‘one
encounter, one experience’ in Japanese tea
ceremony.”
Watercolor is an appropriate medium for
a study of the fugitive. Being aqueous, it slips
and flows on the paper. Satoko’s watercolors
have an atmospheric quality. The eye is
drawn into a layered mist of color, which it
DUSK ON HILLS #3,
WATERCOLOR BY SATOKO.
22 NOVEMBER 20, 2003
SOMEONE ELSE'S LOVER, OIL BY LINDSAY KENNEDY.
can never quite seize and hold. We encounter
no solidity. As viewers we are required to go
with the flow, just as the painter does when
dealing with the medium. “With watercolor, I
just feel that I have to go with the flow of the
water. It is like maneuvering a little boat on a
river or ocean. I have to accept where the
flow is going.”
Satoko, born in Japan, living in Eugene
and with a third home in Tuscany, may have
found her roots in the study of transience.
Lindsay Kennedy:
Person Etcetera
Perugino Café (Nov. 7-Dec. 21)
L
indsay Kennedy’s figurative oils
offer a sharp contrast in approach to
Satoka’s work. At 22, Kennedy is fast
learning mastery of the craft and finding her
voice. Person Etcetera focuses most-
ly on the human figure, portraits and
nudes, but also includes three unusu-
al, tiny still lives. Closet Scene no 1, a
drastically cropped view of hangers
and clothes, provides deadpan humor,
while the red shoes fetchingly por-
trayed in Flats supply the single inci-
dence of bright color.
“I was never drawn to bright col-
ors,” Kennedy said. “I love all the var-
ious tones of gray. They remind me of
water and rocks, which I like a lot.”
Kennedy’s palette is distinctive for
its cool, subdued tones and its minimalism,
although it has expanded since her first
series of strictly white-on-black paintings.
Her palette now includes blues, grays, dark
pinks, umber, and light flesh tones warmed
by discrete pink undertones. Kennedy usual-
ly limits herself to three of these colors in a
single painting and builds them up with
numerous thin layers of paint applied with
invisible brushstrokes.
Eschewing line, Kennedy allows contrast
in tone or value to delineate shapes.
Similarly, facial features, anatomy and folds
in garments are suggested through gradual
shifts in value. Backgrounds are simple and
kept to a single color.
Kennedy’s paintings maintain an interest-
ing tension between realistic modeling of the
human figure and a sustained emphasis on
the two-dimensionality of the canvas through
her treatment of backgrounds as flat areas of
color and her smooth application of paint.
In Kennedy’s nudes, cropping serves to
underline her formalist treatment of the
human figure as an aesthetic object.
Sometimes the entire lower body is cropped,
and sometimes only the buttocks and legs
are represented. Faces are cropped or hidden
away, de-emphasizing the personal element.
Even when a personal story exists behind
a painting, she resolves the personal through
formal means rather than expressionistically.
In Someone Else’s Lover, a female nude
lying on her side on the floor, her back to the
viewer, is depicted through a grid of squares
painted blue, umber and gray, a composition
that can be interpreted in purely formal
terms. Yet this painting chronicles the end of
a relationship: Each square was painted in a
darker or lighter color to express the
painter’s shifting feelings.
Another of Kennedy’s compositional
NUDE, OIL BY LINDSAY KENNEDY.
devices — a counterpoint to her general
predilection to partial views — is to provide
a double perspective of the depicted subject
matter. Cups presents two partial perspec-
tives of a cup and books. Ryan is a double
portrait of a young man whose back and pro-
file appear on the left, a frontal view on the
right. In Me/Myself, Kennedy plays with the
notion of duality by representing her face
pressed against its mirror image.
Whereas a more impersonal aesthetic
approach serves Kennedy’s nudes well, it is
not as felicitous for her portraits. Effective
portraits convey some essential trait of the
individual. Too often in Kennedy’s portraits,
the impression we get is of an individual as
sitter and the resulting stiffness he or she
feels, rather than a sense of the person.
But Kennedy is just starting and so far
has proved hard-working and quick-learn-
ing. She has talent, and I look forward to see
where she will take it.
ew