Artfull Journeys: "The cleansing breeze of everyday objects"
Exhibit: Randall Tuttle Fine Arts Gallery, Woodbury CT, July 1999
The current exhibit at Randall Tuttle Fine Arts Gallery excites with the deft subtlety of a Ralph Sharon piano tune. Luminous, ethereal and fine, the exhibit is an airy tribute to light and atmosphere. In an age of overcrowding and bustle, the new exhibit, the gallery’s best this year, strikes a fine chord of serenity. Gallery favorites Tina Ingraham, Constance La Palombara and Dmitri Cavander combine to create a frothy world of intoxicating substance. If that sounds oxymoronic, consider the work of Ingraham.
Nothing could be simpler than a salt shaker on a table. But Ingraham infuses it with such impressive opacity and textured density that it grows in substance through suggestion.
Ingraham has painted nearly a dozen salt shakers or salt-shaker-like containers and they all are perched in still, breathless solitude. Painting in oil on linen or muslin, Ingraham seems to make the chimerical corporeal. These are salt shakers, to be sure, but they are also pastel tributes to air and light and the tenebrous angles of both. As an opening to the exhibit, Ingraham’s work is ideal. It gives the idea of the bleached, cleansing breeze soon to follow.
…Like all of the works in this spacious but delicate exhibit, Ingraham’s work is devoid of people…
Whether this is an allegorical disenchantment with the way industry had sprouted up a different harvest than the earth it despoils, or a simple fascination with the juxtaposition of the geometry is not clear. La Palombara combines Cavander’s precision with Ingraham’s opaque palette to create a world that is realer than our own and breathtakingly, agreeably still.
Republican-American July 1999 Tracey O’Shaughnessy
