poignant beauty. Her dash and pointillist technique fashions
tableaus rich in emotion and expressive pictorial structure. In
natural tones and with unique rhythms
of composition, her works are reflec-
tions of intimate, delicate interactions
between material and spiritual forces in
the living world.
prism of Impressionists Pissarro--with
his dash and pointillist technique--and the soft landscapes of Monet.
Still life paintings featuring landscapes of tree lined paths, birds
perched upon night lamps, fashionably dressed women strolling about
with pet dogs, and park benches graced with napping cats, pepper
her works. Ta draws inspiration from aspects of both physical and
unseen worlds. Simple things that surrounds us in our daily lives--a
window, a street light, a house--and things that affect us on a deeper,
spiritual level--thoughts of happiness and sadness, friendship and
loneliness--all provide inspiration that is reflected in Ta's paintings. In
Postal Official, a mysterious, frightening postal worker stands beneath
a hanging street clock, trees and an urban cityscape behind him, a
isolation felt in cities where individuals toil in their work but often
feel alienated. The cities are built from buildings stacked on top of
one another vertically, in a manner suggesting factory assemblage,
both the beauty and inevitability of social structures. They are akin
to Klee's towns of distinct, geometrical stacked homes, of interest not
because of their pragmatic visual beauty, but for metaphysical archi-
tectural attributes, pictorial orderliness and metaphysics.
filled trees, paths, and a barely viewed road-bound school bus, all
arranged in a succinct, powerful composition of mercurial elegance.
Interweaving these physical and unseen worlds, their internal and
external forces, drives and inspires Ta's work. Breakfast, though on
the surface a quiet, unassuming still life, brims with life, drama, and
narrative innuendo. An outdoor breakfast table composed with soft
pastels of blue, green, and pink, is reminiscent of the mature cubist
work of Georges Braque, though the use of color and light is distinc-
tively Impressionistic. The table, set charmingly with green apples,
croissant, and cup of coffee, awaits a diner who will breakfast alone.
A flower placed in a cup of water is a sincere effort by someone--a
servant, lover, the diner himself--to make quaint and pleasant this
outdoor dining session. And yet, mysteriously, the diner has yet to
appear to enjoy it, the coffee growing cold. "My paintings are my
thoughts, my childhood memories that are calling me back, new
experiences and my dreams that drive me forward." Barbanakova