For centuries artists have used color and/or shading to communicate light such as moon or sunlight, lamps and candles, or moods. The contrast between light and dark, the tension created by these two visual forces, continues to create opportunities for the artist to explore new realms of expression. Now the Marion Art Center’s gallery walls are covered with new ways that the use of light is being presented in a two-person show titled Illuminations.
Tamalin Baumgarten and Meredith Leich are two women for which the world of art can rejoice. Baumgarten’s works have been described as realistic and likened to Edward Hopper. Juxtaposed to Baumgarten’s paintings are Meredith Leich’s videos and photographs of fine art quality. The two artists met in 2017 while in residency at a summer art colony in Vermont. Their friendship has become creatively entwined as they more recently managed the summer art colony at the Avalon on Cuttyhunk Island.
For Baumgarten, being on Cuttyhunk is like going home, although as a child growing up on the west coast, she seldom visited the Buzzards Bay Island. Her grandfather David Baumgarten and his wife Marilyn Snow lived in the home from 1957 until Snow’s passing in 1982. Subsequently, the residence was bequeathed to the town and a foundation for permanent conservatorship.
The two artists find working together on Cuttyhunk a place where their inspiration becomes aspiration. As Baumgarten pursues a more traditional use of mediums, oils and subject matter, Leich takes on technology with themes both surprising and unique.
Leich is a photographer and an environmentalist using her art to communicate the issue of climate change. In her website biography, she states, “I’m an animator, painter and installation artist whose work explores the nature, place-based in histories and climate change through scientific research and intuitive visual exploration.”
Leich possesses the talent for finding the inner lives of inanimate objects, glaciers and buildings, for instance.
The pieces on display at the MAC show her employment of a complicated process, taking sequential photographs of large objects such as factories in Fall River, over which light is placed and videotaped. One image shows the rise and fall of a projected tide against an old factory, while another, of a glacier, includes brilliant, white curvilinear lines. That theme can be found in several of her inkjet compositions. They could denote the passage of time or the omnipresence of the spirit in the natural world.
Baumgarten’s themes are luminous in her use of color to convey light as it plays against old homes and structures. The paintings are oil on panel, a time-consuming and exacting painting method. She doesn’t give the viewer the full story; we see the corner of a room, the front façade of a church, a row of small sailboats seemingly to float above the water.
When asked about the absence of people in her painting, Baumgarten said, “The viewer is the person in the painting, unseen but there.” She said her paintings are full but full of stillness that comes through in her use of muted tones. “These tones hold memories…. Light and shadow are the focus; color would take that away – it would interfere.”
To give her finished works an even softer textured appearance, the artist uses a soft brush to gently stipple over paint on the panel. The effect gives the painting a glossy finish that adds to the mood of the tones. One attendee who is familiar with various forms of artistic expression commented, “I’ve never seen that before!”
To see for yourself, head over to the Marion Art Center before the lights go out on this truly original exhibition. Visit Marionartcenter.org.
By Marilou Newell