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Mary Pearson-Scott |
Review of Exhibition at the John Russell Gallery by the late Colin Moss; Painter has "fruitful obsession with mirrors" | ||||||
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Frugality may scarcely be a popular topic in hard times, but this Ipswich artist contrives, with some success, to make a virtue of it.
She frequently selects the barest, most commonplace subjects, executing them totally without regard for bravura handling or glamorous colour. There is something of the carefully calculated drabness of Jack Smith's social realist painting of the 50's, and she is a thoughtful, skilled manipulator of her sparse material. Mary's largest canvas "Summer Interior" is reduced to three rectangles - the floor, the wall, and part of a door in somewhat reduced colour. It is the most ruthlessly, austerely simplified thing in the show, to the extent that without benefit of catalogue, it would certainly be identified as non-figurative. While the drawing "Cellar Corner" is readily recognisable, it is in sum nothing more than three planes, two vertical and one horizontal, with a mirror placed at their conjunction. Mary has a very fruitful obsession with mirrors, shown at its most ingenious in the oil "Mirror in Studio", which while nominally a self portrait, is really a vehicle for a complexly orchestrated arrangement of the usual studio clutter like easels, with a little something of Braque - who used the same theme so often - about it. The self - portrait frequently provides a hook for Mary Pearson to hang a picture on, although she is no narcissist. For instance, she uses it in the oil "Introspection" with considerable imagination, about 90 per cent of the canvas being a plain, grey wall with, just off centre, near the top, a small mirror in which the artist's head and shoulders appear. She pays some lip service to likeness, but is primarily concerned with the sense of isolation which this stange design imposes. From such stressed simplicity she can turn to marked complexity in "Out House", an oil in which the rectangular grid of the glass paned door becomes a scafolding for an intricate arrangement. Another inventive piece is the nearby drawing "Studio and Mirror Study". There is much more to this artist than first, superficial impressions convey. |