LYNDA POGUE
C anadian artist Lynda Pogue is a vibrant professor, keynote speaker, author and consultant. Her multi-faceted career requires her to convey information and simultaneously shape the reception of that information. Appropriately, many of her mixed-media canvases are at once representational and expressive. Her compositions suggest just enough layering to uphold the illusion of three-dimensional space. The canvases also communicate several emotional layers that shape the viewer’s experience of the works. These expressive registers pull the viewer in multiple directions, adding complexity to Pogue’s luminous compositions. With the areas of color and texture playing off one another, paintings can appear at once melancholic, brooding and explosive. Pogue eloquently combines her informational and emotional sensibilities in these works, making them simultaneously pictorial and profoundly moving.
Many of Pogue’s artworks verge on abstraction; superimposing a third aspect onto this equation. Her division of the canvas into two or three melding fragments often suggests a stripped landscape, but also functions as an abstract arrangement of colors, tones and light. What resembles a progression from foreground towards background, from bottom to top, flattens out into an abstract arrangement of complementary colors. This sensation in Pogue’s work is emphasized by her incorporation of non-traditional materials that help pull the viewer out of the illusion of three-dimensional space on the canvas. Suddenly, the viewer contemplates the surface relief, the materiality of the object, as well as its composition or emotive qualities.
Far from creating tension, however, Pogue is able to harmonize these viewing impulses into a playful experience. The abstract and expressive properties intermingle; the colors and movements on her canvases complement both their tactility and flatness. Her work then does not only evoke emotions through colors and shapes, but gives them texture and weight through the images and materials on her canvases. The unusual media she incorporates – such as wax, glass, sand and stones – also echo many of the landscapes and abstractions suggested by the canvases.
All these dimensions unfold the longer one looks at one of Pogue’s paintings, making for a continuously rewarding viewing experience. Opportunities for re-combinations and the creation of new meaning are endless, affording infinite possibilities for viewers to experience what Pogue calls an “internal wow.”
Website: http://lyndapogue.com