Sylvia Garland: Paintings & Montotypes at the Tucson Jewish Community Center (April 14-May 19, 2011)

"Betty's Garden" (monotype))

Local painter Sylvia Garland will be sharing the gallery with photographer Edlynne Stillman this month at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. This review will focus on the work of Sylvia Garland. 

Sylvia Garland has two bodies of work in this exhibit: oil paintings and monotypes.  She's got 12 oil paintings, and 10 monotypes, and they are hung in a straight row in the gallery, with the oil paintings lined up on one side of the wall, and the monotypes lined up on the other.


A monotype is a one-shot print that is similar to painting. The artist inks a plexiglass plate with sticky printing ink (which comes in a variety of colors), then draws or scratches into the surface (that is, "drawing"), and then putting a piece of paper over it an running it through a printing press, to produce a one-shot print; a print made from a painting of printer's ink. With the work she has here, Sylvia isn't content to simply create a straightforward monoprint. Rather, she adds various other materials, such as leaves, or bit of fabric, into order to introduce a realistic "natural" element, but also to add visual interest. In works such as "Betty's Garden", the Eucalyptus leaves, which she's inked with yellow ink, jump forward as the more hazy bands of color recede into the background.

 As far as colors go, Sylvia likes to stick the the basic primary and secondary colors. This is true for both her monotypes as well as her oil paintings. In many of her works, you'll find an object for every primary and secondary color. She seems to like there to be an equal balance between shapes colored red, yellow, blue, green, red, and purple.  Her work is strongest, I feel, when one of those colors predominates -- that is, where one color dominates the picture

"Interlude"

 One such picture is "Interlude", which is a monontype with some great drawing of abstracted figures involved in what looks like a dance or ceremony. The picture reminds me of cave painting, but Garland has some additional features, such as the impression of some grass-like matter in the center bottom portion of the picture. She's also collaged some interesting elements into this piece, such as shiny copper foil (on the figure in the far left of the picture), as well as having collaged tiny scraps of sheet music throughout the right side of this piece (impossible to see in this photo) Most of the monotypes in this exhibit have that "cave" quality. For me, this type of imagery is an homage to surrealism common in the 1940's or so. That's what I'm referring to when I say that Garlands work has a retro-surreal quality to it.

"Pieris' (oil on canvas)

Sylvia's oil paintings have a similar retro-surreal quality, although the subject matter is different. As she says in her artist's statement, she's inspired by plant shapes, and uses that as a point of departure for her artwork. Indeed, it's easy to recognize plant forms in her work. What I like about Sylvia's style though, is that here's an ambiguity about where and what her subject matter really is. Although she's initially inspired by plant forms, many of her oil paintings have the look of a neural network; they remind me of scientific illustrations of brain synapses. Other times, her work looks like the interior of a cave, with its stalactites and stalagmites, growing together from floor to ceiling. Sylvia may paint from Nature, but she does a lot of embellishing an improvising, which in turn gives her renditions of Nature a sort of otherworldly spaced out quality.

"Botanica"

One of my favorite pieces n this show is an oil painting called "Botanica". Sylvia Garland's work has a sort of nostalgic quality that makes me think back to science fiction and fantasy illustration of the '50's.  The subject matter is seed pods, and a ripe pomegranate bursting open with seeds.  It's got a kind of other worldly eroticization of plant life.   

Her monotypes more often than not include abstractions of the human figure, whereas her oil paintings (in this show) are almost exclusively about natural forms, especially seed pods.  I enjoy looking at her work. She's interested in forms and shapes, and working basic colors: the primaries and secondaries.  She has a real affinity for natural forms, and demonstrates this by adding bits of real plant-life to her monoprints, and also creating an invented surrealistic environment in her oil paintings.   She's got a good sense for creating interesting environments, that are ambiguous in size: are those plant forms in a dark cave? Or are they microscopic, akin to nerve cells in your brain? My guess is they're probably both: ripe,  abstracted forms,  that represent the varieties of all life forms.  Much of this work has a strange other-worldly quality to it, but once you take it all in, you can see that, as with the monoprint "Interlude", it's about the dance of Life.