Old Friends/New Work: Tom Hall and Lissa Hunter
June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, Maine
September 9 to 25, 2010

Review: The Portland Press Herald, September 19, 2010

In the Arts: Masters of darkness deliver shades of brilliance by Phillip Isaacson

The title to the show notwithstanding -- "Old Friends/New Work" -- Tom Hall and Lissa Hunter struck me as an odd combination. Hall is a master of darkness. You grapple for light when you digest one of his paintings. That search gives them their urgency.

Hunter, by long occupation, is a basket maker who has gently tapped the sublime. I have seen examples of her work that were so demure and fragile that they touched my heart. Hall's paintings and Hunter's baskets -- fat bravura strokes versus the delicate intensity of a Swiss watchmaker -- would not relax in company with each other, friendship or not.

These were my thoughts when I first heard of the show at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland. My perceptions turned out to be wrong, largely because Hunter appeared as a draftsman-painter and not as an artisan. To jump from a craft in which she had achieved high recognition into the dangerous waters of drawing and painting was cause for speculation.

He maintains enough edge to prevent the images from sliding into melancholy; otherwise stated, he uses darkness to displace wistfulness. It is not a matter of balancing between light and darkness; his paintings are not nocturnes. Rather, through the agency of darkness, he comments on the elapse of events with considerable passion. His paintings can be quite remarkable.

Returning to Hunter, here she appears as a commentator on nature -- on stones, leaves, pods, birds and so on. The subjects invite a cordial embrace, but like Hall, she keeps her distance. Birds roosting as day ends merge into coagulated dark masses. Dark flowers have darker leaves in a mottled space. Leaves, stones and pods are offered in articulated muscular form. It is all consequential and, at least in suggestion, dark. The decorative opportunities provided by the subject matter are declined.

To sum things up, here are two intense artists with very little in common other than their individual intensities and inclinations toward darkness. Those ingredients are somehow sufficient. This is an extremely good show.

Phillip Isaacson, Senior Art Critic, Portland Press Herald