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Gloria GarfinkelVISUAL METAPHORS
For most visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a post card marking a visit is posted and becomes a token of shared remembrance. Instead of passing it along, Gloria Garfinkel held onto a postcard depicting a fan-shaped colored image of a Hiroshige woodcut for over nine years. She found in this Nineteenth century Hiroshige woodcut, from the Metropolitan Museum, an inspiration and a design motif for a series of paintings developed over the past three years.
After several years of experimenting with multi-layered prints based on Japanese kimono patterns, and a series of sculpture-like three dimensional outdoor paintings, Garfinkel's work is again focused on painting itself. Her current works include nine tondos, six feet in diameter, six diamond shaped works, also six feet in diameter, a dozen rectangular paintings 19 x 23 inches, and a few monotypes. Like the previous works, which culminated in the exhibition "Haiku for the Eyes" in 1995 at the Hamilton College in New York and the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee, these works can be seen as metaphors or even visual meditations on the kimono. The pattern of alternating blue and white stripes found in Hiroshige's image functions as a basic structural element in her most recent paintings. In these paintings, the realism of the postcard chrysanthemums become abstract shapes. These abstract shapes intimate, but do not replicate, the forms of Hiroshige's chrysanthemums.
Garfinkel's strongest features, as reflected in her art, are a radical commitment to experimentation and an exceptional sense of color. In this case, the composition of the paintings reflects the experimental spirit of the author. Textured elements from any and every source are freely appropriated in her works, and the applications of paint vary from rubbings to more conventional means. For instance, the present series incorporates paint rolled on textured wall paper acquired on a trip through Russia, and pressed on the paper or canvas to enrich the textures. In one of the tondos, a found strawberry box was applied to the painting surface to create Jasper Johns-like grids. Collage elements such as strips of cloth from failed painting, along with congealed globs of toppings from old paint containers, are recycled throughout the series paintings as elements of collage. Nothing is ever wasted in Garfinkel's processes, simply recycled in a future project.
Her ability to generate unusual color relationships produces lush pictorial surfaces with many facets. Some of the paintings begin with layers of turpentine washes applied to fine percale cloth to form an initial structure based on transparent undercolors. The resulting blend of hues in these works appears as an array of bright, intense colors that are enormously pleasing to the eye. Overlapping organic configurations produced in this manner are enhanced with collage and subsequently attached to sized canvases. A raised, layered canvas on board featuring the blue and white stripes, forms the outer ring of the pictures. The cut of the blue and white outer ring is irregular, but all of the tondo and diamond shaped pieces in their respective series, have the same matrix. Variations of the system are achieved by shifting the matrix thus altering the compositions.
Like the kimono worn in Japanese theatrical performances, appreciated for their color, weave, embroidery, and patterns, Garfinkel's multi-layered constructions are endowed with colorful patterns incorporating elements of collage, line, and texture. There are important differences nevertheless between the kimono and Garfinkel's paintings. The artistry and true beauty of the kimono is revealed only when it appears as a three dimensional image attached to a moving body flowing through space. The kimono in a theatrical performance is further enhanced by the symbolism of the colors and the design, which are also linked to a character-type, and to other theatrical conventions such as music, plot, and set. The configurations and drapery of outer and inner robes also contribute to overall appreciation and significance of the kimono.
It is necessary therefore to consider Garfinkel's works on their own merit, however useful the metaphor linking them to the kimono might be. The artist is thus challenged to create works in an essentially two dimensional medium that allow the use of only some of the resources available to the art of the kimono - not withstanding that her works do on occasion extend into three dimensional space. Since her paintings cannot handily attach themselves to bodies and fly across the stage, she must use other visual means to enliven their abstract, flat pictorial surfaces. And indeed she does, as has been shown earlier. Their multi-layered features invite careful scrutiny and interpretation. Unlike many works produced by artists of the late twentieth century, these paintings are life affirming, while effectively concealing the struggle necessary to produce them. They perhaps distill certain life experiences of the artist, but within the limits of a vocabulary of abstraction. No story line is evident, although the choice of exotic materials offers an occasional clue for the curious. For most part, the embedded energies attending personal revelations will not traverse the tightly controlled formal structures.
Curtis L. Carter July 1998
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