"Wendy White at Solomon Projects"

May 2001 by Cathy Byrd

Wendy White's "Spilled in Space" exhibition had the deceiving look of an interrupted "paint by number" project. But in fact the artist carefully orchestrates measured brushstrokes, controlled drips and purposeful omissions of pigment. A love for materials and the objectness of painting is evident in each of the 11 canvases, all from 1999 or 2000, painted in acrylic, gouache and/or tempera.

In Cut Down Town, a pile of turquoise wood outlined in drab olive lies on a round flesh-toned hill. A blue, green and white sky drips into the chocolate-and-deep-brown mountain behind the rise. The sickly cast of City Water alludes to the disease of urban development. Aquamarine water surrounds a little cluster of floating logs and half-submerged stumps. Having edged a barren orange-yellow peninsula and a black plateau in the distance, the water seems to drip over a wall-like, black-lined gray form in the foreground.

The irony in Rancho Meltos begins with ghostly outlines of leafless trees against a half-painted, sand-colored sky. Peach-hued snow covers the wood-frame gateway to the ranch. There is a sense of damaged nature in the peach fluff that drifts down from the top and one side of the frame into a puddling mass below.

Depicted objects such as furniture and ropes often intrude on these scenes. In Alley, the leg of a pink chair peeks out from a mound of draped gray cloth. Once in a while, White pretends to throw eggs at her own compositions. In One Eye, she has painted bright white albumen that blooms around a broken yolk and streams down the canvas to end up behind the black, gray and sage-green landscape.

White has exhibited her work at regional, national and international venues since 1992. A few years ago, her subject became darkly comic laboratory experiments; she painted scientific gadgets, beakers and test tubes on tables with wheels. At the same time, the artist made paintings that obscured visual facts. Shown shrouded in fabric, the objects in these works take on a mysterious theatrical importance. Her more recent "Public Monuments" are small sculptures of mountains set on casters or wooden legs, their amorphous, papier-mache shapes rendered in solid nondescriptive colors.

"Spilled in Space" reflected White's ongoing interest in making landscape imagery that somehow is able to suggest both a panoramic grandeur and a disturbing vulnerability.