“A few months before she passed, my mom told me she’d had a dream that she was supposed to have a show called ‘Turn on the Light!’ It would be in January of the new year, manifesting our emergence from COVID and hope for our brighter future, and she would ask each artist she represented to contribute a piece that was light-filled or light-inspired,” says Lyn Bolen Warren’s daughter Hagan Tampellini.
Instead, “Turn on the Light!” at Les Yeux du Monde honors the gallery’s late founder with a group show of Charlottesville artists, as well as artists Warren represented from farther afield. The exhibition brings together 57 artists, including Picasso, whose inclusion acknowledges Warren’s involvement with the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies, which she helped found and co-directed.
“The show is a reflection of the magnitude of her career as a gallerist and breadth of artists whose work she fostered,” says Tampellini, who has taken over the gallery. “It’s come together in a very cohesive way despite the diverse mix of artists and styles represented.”
Millicent Young’s “An Origin Story from the Sixth Extinction,” a luminous column of horsehair that rises from the black void of a ceramic vessel, was created specifically for its spot in front of a long window, where it takes advantage of natural light. Young painstakingly sewed strands of dark horsehair onto white to express the transition from darkness into light that is the show’s theme.
A melding of minimalist design and delicate ornithological rendering, Cary Brown’s “Dove for LBW” speaks to the endurance of the soul. According to Tampellini, “My mom envisioned her father as a dove. After he died, she saw doves everywhere. She believed they were her father visiting her. She was spiritual in many different ways, and saw the divine in many things.” This particular dove grasps a four-leaf clover in its beak. Tampellini explains that her mother had the ability to look at the ground and find four-leaf clovers. It’s something she inherited from her grandmother, who reputedly could spot a four-leaf clover from astride a horse. And with Tampellini’s brother also blessed with the trait, four-leaf clovers have enormous significance for the family.
Susan McAlister’s charming bouquet of cut paper flowers, “Led by the Light I,” seems to burst forth from the picture plane. The work has a fresh, fun quality with its breezy palette and layering of differently shaped blooms that compose the arrangement. It was Warren who encouraged McAlister to explore cut paper forms in the tradition of Matisse, a fact the artist alludes to with her title.
Kurt Steger’s handsome “Magician” suggests both a human figure and a ritualistic object. Constructed of wood and paper, the piece evokes cubism with its dynamic rhythm of abutting three-dimensional planes that resemble stone. While “Magician’’ boasts a jute-covered handle and is filled with found objects from Nepal that rattle when it’s shaken, one may also interpret the figure as Warren, with the title alluding to the magic she created.
Trisha Orr infuses “Dutch”’s ordinary scene of quiet domesticity with unexpected power. Wielding her brush with utter confidence, she slashes yellow across the mirror to connote reflected light, dashes off strokes of gray, blue, lavender, and yellow to describe the Venetian blinds, and scrawls purple across a plate to create the effect of light and shadow on shiny ceramic. The thick fringe of eyelashes and the lips pressed against the child’s head, are small details that reveal authentic and arresting aspects of the sitter’s psychology and the deep bond between mother and child.
Russ Warren’s series of portraits of his late wife highlight different aspects of her spirit. These works are rendered with bold lines and strong color on newspaper. In “Lyn 2,” she stares resolutely out at the viewer while also looking off to the side, revealing her strength and depth of character. In “Lyn 3,” Warren arranges her encircling arms to create a heart that is both a testament to his love for his wife and a depiction of her as the embodiment of love.
Mysterious and evocative, Elizabeth Bradford’s dazzling nocturnal view in “City Lights, Algarve” feels both sophisticated and primitive. In the foreground, a series of deftly painted rocks front a rise where a shaggy tree is silhouetted against a vivid midnight-blue sky. Bradford ups the drama with pricks of white denoting stars and bright beads of yellow pigment representing the haloed glow of city lights.
Looking at “Last Light,” you can marvel at the gorgeous autumnal scene Karen Blair has created. Her juxtaposition of colors—here, primarily ochre, brown, green, and blue—is mouthwatering. Her inventive application of paint, with flat expanses, lively brushwork, messy streaks, and the scraping off of pigment, used variously to create depth, movement, and texture, is inspired.
Dorothy Robinson’s ravishing “Oscawana I,” depicts a real place, but does so with very little in the way of representational landmarks. We sense more than see a river, a waterfall, mountains, and trees. Rendered with washes, daubs and drips of paint, that are essentially abstract passages, the light-infused work evokes the romantic energy, atmospheric effect and idealized reality of a 19th-century landscape.
To achieve the blurry effect of “Frank (2),” Pam Black uses PanPastels (soft pastels), which are applied with sponges. A figure, positioned far off to the left within a wide expanse of empty space, is isolated and indistinct. Though he appears like an out-of-focus photograph, and his face is shadowed by a cowboy hat, we can intuit his weathered grit and, perhaps, his incorporeality. Whoever this man was, we know, like Warren, he cast a long shadow.