Susan Eck
S
usan Eck's paintings depict the simple and the commonplace: an ordinary landscape or seascape, a flower or a wheat field. Yet her paintings seek human emotion in nature, and reflect it back to the viewer—an especially extraordinary and powerful enterprise. Eck has an excellent command of brushwork and will often contrast short brushstrokes with long ones, replicating the variety and complexity found in nature.
Eck's nature paintings pay great attention to planes and horizons, be they formed by a skyline, a waterline, flowers, or grass. In her abstract paintings, however, Eck takes her viewers'
attention in different directions. Her paint washes, drips, and congeals in various vertical orientations in her mixed media composition called "Upward Explosion," while lavenders that swirl and vibrate from the center of "Flowing" are mesmerizing yet soothing. "Wheat" might be her most daring painting to date, as it draws the eye in various directions; suggests several plains or horizons; and blurs the boundary between abstract and natural forms.
Eck's work has been displayed in both solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles at Infusion Gallery and in Toronto and throughout greater Ontario. The author of four books of poetry, Eck is also an accomplished poet and lyricist. She has won several awards for her music and poetry, including an editor's choice award from the International Library of Poetry. http://susaneck.ca
Marty Maehr
L'OR
T
he figures of artist L'OR's vibrant pastels would be at home in Gauguin's tropical paintings, but L'OR has much more than portraiture in mind. Depicted for us with pastels on canvas or velvet, her subjects, suspended in motions of desire in all its variations, inhabit a vivid dreamscape. Abstract swirls evolve into flora, and reveal their universality against backgrounds of lush crimson, jade, or cerulean.
The longing to merge pervades L'OR's work. Working with her models is an intimate collaboration, the creative process becomes much more than an exploration of the lone artistic self. The desire to bridge gaps-between individuals, and between the artist and her tech-
E
xalting hills, mountains, flowers, and trees in joyful swathes of color, Marty Maehr captures the energizing spirit of Nature in both recognizable forms and geometric abstractions. Giving his creative instincts free reign at the onset of his creative process, a deeply felt surge of inspiration initially manifests as a single point, line or arc of expression—out of which subsequent lines, shapes or colors emerge. Departing from a traditional understanding of perspective and spatial cues, Maehr allows his intuition to guide a seemingly random arrangement of basic planes until overwhelming impressions of
nique-is the lifeblood of her work. She strives to reveal, in the moments when pastel touches surface, "the emotions we try sometimes so hopelessly to hide." Thus, L'OR tells us, is our humanity recovered, in the idyllic medium of art.
L'OR maps tropical zones of universal longing usually left unseen. Her berry-red figures, nearly featureless, are all the more remarkable for the emotions they evoke. Her artistic process is a fertile ground upon which she creates mythic, yet psychologically resonant figures. Exhibited widely in the United States, L'OR lives in Quebec, where she shows much of her work and is a signature member of the Pastel Society of Eastern Canada.
color interrupt the developing structure. Though this vaguely cubist I interpenetration of forms gives Maehr's work continuity and complex I prismatic dimension, it is through color that Maehr's paintings begin I to "breathe" and acquire an autonomous life. Seized by a single note I of color or a particular color combination, Maehr animates his subjects I tone by tone, facet by facet, achieving nearly psychedelic levels of I vibrancy. Like Kandinsky who famously wrote 'Color is the keyboard, I the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings', Maehr I harnesses powers inherent in the visible spectrum to convey a sense of I harmony and resonant beauty.