The Life Aquatic

originally published July 16, 2008

The Lyndon House’s current exhibition “Immersion: Exploring the Depths of Watermedia” features the paintings of local artists Celia Brooks, Njambi Mwaura, Par Ramey and Elizabeth Vitale. As the title indicates, the unifying factor throughout the show is the artists’ choice of medium, and the show primarily consists of watercolor paintings on paper, although there are a few acrylic paintings included. A majority of the work leans toward abstraction that utilizes the intrinsic qualities of the medium, although there is a range of representative imagery that includes everything from sedate pictures of kittens in a garden to fantastic, spectral scenes that have the quality of a hallucinated vision.

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Dreamscape: Representative of the latter type, Njambi Mwaura’s application of watercolor ranges from a more traditional use of the medium to a much dryer manipulation of paint that makes it seem like a denser, more opaque pigment. The artist’s highly personal work is based on her own dreams, and this process of reifying her internal visions seems to provide her a good deal of liberty - not bound to any particular genre, she paints everything from non-objective abstraction to surreal figural scenes. Like her idiosyncratic imagery, Mwaura’s use of color is rich and intuitive, and her palette occasionally includes unconventional flourishes such as the inclusion of makeup, clove and goldenseal, as she does in a tiny cityscape complete with a miniature railroad track and pattern-like trees titled "Cleveland." Mwaura also occasionally breaks out of the conventional rectangular paper format, as in "Births and Bath," in which the top of the paper has been ripped to an irregular shape. One of her larger paintings included in the exhibition, "Births..." is fairly emblematic of Mwaura’s intense but ethereal imagery - nothing in the painting is overly detailed, figures are reduced to blocky forms and the entire page is covered in energetic and painterly brushwork that is reminiscent of expressionistic and symbolist brands of modernist painting.

The primary figure is a woman whose long braid transforms into the roof of a proportionally tiny orange house as she runs toward a lake, stretching her arm outward. Under the surface of the water is a child, and it is unclear whether he is floating or something more sinister is taking place. The woman’s gesture seems frantic and dolorous as she tries to reach the child, but is encumbered and slowed by the house to which she is bound by her long hair. Although the two peculiar figures are the focal point of the image, they are situated in an opulent landscape worthy of its own attention. Muddled, richly layered paint (a characteristic somewhat antithetical to the delicate medium of watercolor) is accented with the occasional pop of pure color such as bright hot pink or neon oranges that nicely play off of the areas of highly worked pigment.

One of the more eerie and disconcerting images by Mwaura is "Dale’s Serpent," an image with the aura of a religious vision. An icon-like figure wearing a red cloak stands in front of a body of bright water and blood-orange sky. A large serpent with rows of large, carnivorous teeth seems inexplicably and terrifyingly connected to his body. In paintings such as the enigmatically-titled "Dark Space," Mwaura delves into pure abstraction. Again using ripped paper, she has loosely applied a tangle of sketchy, Pollock-style lines on top of blotches of bright color. At the upper righthand corner, her signature floats upside down.

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Nirvana: Generally more serene and austere than Mwaura’s menagerie of characters and vivid, multifarious color, many of Celia Brooks’ watercolors come out of her yoga practice, and the imagery is appropriately organic and tranquil. In "Vinyasa," for instance, an array of green, gold and maroon contemplatively leads the viewer’s eye through the composition without drawing too much attention to a single area. Although much of her work is meditative and calm, Brooks’ palette and brushwork can turn more chaotic. At the bottom of her painting "with an olive & twist (what’s in your martini)" is a recognizable martini glass that seems to be the inspiration for a morass of bright teal, red, yellow, white and gold leaf that transforms into a dense field of purple toward the edges. As Brooks explains, drinking a martini in the right way can be meditative.

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American Idyll: Par Ramsey’s strongest works are those that seem to be based on observation. Large evergreen trees backlit by bright yellow sunlight are the subject of "Johanna’s Trees, Williamsburg, Michigan." The image captures the glowing quality of the sky against the verdant trees during summer. Likewise capturing a tranquil scene, "On the Bayou" is a dominantly purple image that plays up the colors of nature and captures an almost atavistic American scene that seems as if it belongs to the early years of the last century.

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Natural Wonders: Composed on a circular canvas, Elizabeth Vitale’s "Branch Out" is one of the relatively few acrylic paintings included in the show. Two intertwining branches are the sole subject matter of the cropped, sparse image. Another large acrylic painting, "Fly Away," seems to be inspired by nature and its irregular forms and patterns, and is related to a number of her untitled abstract watercolors with similar references. Like the other three artists in the exhibition, Vitale’s work seems intuitive and self-referential - characteristics that link the disparate painters’ work.

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In Addition: Also included upstairs at the Lyndon House is an installation of aquatic-themed children’s work that expands daily as the summer art program progresses titled “When Fish Fly.” Walking inside feels like stepping into the interior of a psychedelic aquarium: a large whale is the centerpiece, although there is a plethora of quasi-imaginary sea creatures to accompany it. Downstairs is “Portraits of Our Community,” a collection of graphite drawings by Stan Mullins documenting local people who contribute to the community. Alongside each portrait is a description of each individual and his or her contribution to the Athens community. All three shows are up until July 19.

Rebecca Brantley