Art Review: Rachael Burke – Erie Reader

What is interior landscape?I wondered this when I entered Kada Gallery and read the title of the current exhibition. My first thought was an indoor garden such as a botanical garden. Center in Cleveland or Phipps Conservatory of Music in Pittsburgh. In general, when we think of landscape paintings, we think of traditional landscape paintings depicting the natural world, which is the opposite of the outside world, the outside world, the inner world, and space. But as I toured the new exhibition of paintings by Rachel Burke, the meaning of the title began to take shape. These seemingly outdoor landscapes carry the imprint of the artist’s deep inner reality of emotions and impulses, sometimes aggressive and dark. It’s a painting process of how you construct a painting as you look for the equivalent of what you think and feel.”

Burke’s paintings are foliage-rich, colorful, Aggressiveness of brushstrokes. Presented both in oil on canvas and in oil on wood panel, the paintings depict the natural habitat of trees, bushes, and plants with occasional stream views. Or a pond. Burke’s style is to abstract this setting so that the viewer feels the motion and vibration of the subject. The trees bend, the leaves and branches blur, and you lose your sense of direction. The out-of-focus colors and shapes made me imagine coming to an unfamiliar place and trying to find my own direction.

There is an element of danger in these paintings that gives them an edge that I appreciate. Some of the slashes conjure up machete chopping through a dense foliage jungle. The artist appears to apply a thick swash of oil using a brush, a palette his knife, and perhaps a finger.some of the works hiddenwhich shines with varnish and gives the vegetation a damp look, as if it had been rendered after a rainstorm.

Rachel Burke Side by Side

Two works that particularly impressed me essential architecture When signpostThese were the only paintings in the show that appeared to have the same subject matter. Branches and sticks as focal points, each rendered differently. In the latter, the mountains were more detailed. The stacks had depth, the dark holes inside were deeper and the branches were sharper. in contrast, essential architecture As the abstraction progresses, the brush strokes become more intense and blurry. The white used for the sticks gave them a ghostly pallidity, and the sticks turned into bones and cracked ribs on the canvas. I wondered. Will she, at some point, abandon all recognizable forms?

Another picture I’ve seen over and over again is Alongsidean image of two trees in the distance A bank located in the center of the panel.I know both Rachel and her (not very well, but by eye) Partner Dan Burke – another local painter – I couldn’t help but think of this work as a double portrait. The tree on the left resembled Rachel’s figure with long, straight hair hanging down her shoulders, while the tree on the right recalls Dan’s unkempt hair and tall silhouette. It may be sheer coincidence, but it seems like a fitting and perhaps sly idea for an artist to represent his own imaginative landscape as a tree. At least in Burke’s work, it’s a reminder that the inner and outer worlds overlap.

The artist’s exhibition statement does not reveal whether she paints Plein Air (i.e. in an open landscape) or works from photographs, but I felt this information was unimportant. It was deliberately kept away from the viewer in order to free us from any concrete starting point. Burke has said that she is an “improvisational painter”, making most of her decisions “in real time, rather than using a completely or highly pre-determined system.”Artist’s commitment Improvisation freed me from the imposed agenda while viewing the work.I felt like I could improvise Paintings to explore randomly.

My only concern is the number of paintings displayed in the space. The work was so close to me that I didn’t even have time to breathe. One wall was layered with paintings, with the smallest pieces of the show hanging high in places that were hard to see. Unfortunately, crowds like this are often a feature of local galleries, as opposed to larger spaces like museums. I’ve run into this problem with almost every gallery in Erie. I know ‘salon-style galleries’ were popular in the 19th century, but given our eyes are constantly bombarded with images from television and computer screens, it’s a good idea to rest and recharge your eyes between works. It seems more important than ever to have space for

I enjoyed this show for its evocative brushwork and its underlying sense of menace. Inhabit many works. The duality of calmness and aggression in nature. What seems calm can be a mirage of danger lurking within. At first it may seem like a harmless landscape painting, but upon deeper exploration it turns into something much more ambiguous.

For interior landscapes, visit The Kada Gallery // 2632 W. 8th St. // kadagallery.com through January 27, 2023.