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In the form of weeds, nature invades well-tended
gardens and pastures or bursts up through city sidewalks and along
roadsides everywhere. Anda Dubinskis' recent drawings of weeds
endeavor to grant them new respect. The drawings were inspired
by a trip to Latvia (her parents' homeland) where she explored
the countryside and collected plant specimens. Dubinskis says
the trip was seminal because she saw "the importance of the
land to the people who live there," and because she came
home with a sketchbook filled with pressed plants and drawings.
Not long after her return, she began working on a series of drawings
of the plants around her in her daily life, plucked either from
her garden in Maine, where she lives for part of the year, or
from the sidewalks and vacant lots of Philadelphia.
Dubinskis is known best for her restrained and enigmatic figure
paintings about "observing nuances of expression, gestures
and body language," and her new work demonstrates her skills
can be applied to plant as well as human forms. Out of the 26
pieces in the show, half are representations of plants on layered
Mylar made in a burst of creative energy in 2002. They are detailed,
spare, delicate and vigorous; drawn with a fine brush in acrylic
color. In Memory,
a little gem at 10 1/4 inches by 15 inches, Dubinskis groups a
clump of heart-shaped leaves and tiny flowers together with wispy
grasses. The colors gradually shift from green to gold to reddish-brown.
On a lower level of Mylar, there are shadowy plants like ghosts
of last year's foliage in a soft peacock blue.
In the Pond, 22 inches by 17 inches,
contains a mysterious assortment of forms. There's some frilly
chartreuse and ochre foliage, possibly pigweed, next to a tall
bright green stalk of leaves shaped like leeks. A soft orange-gold
intestinal form with what looks like suckers -- rows of tiny circles
with dots inside -- winds all over the page. Later I found out
they're frog eggs.
Red Meadow
is one of the larger pieces, at 42 inches by 30 inches, and like
Dürer's watercolor painting The Large Piece of Turf
it describes a microcosm. Dubinskis has arranged a group of three
different types of plants in jewel tones of pink, red and orange,
and a second clump of at least seven kinds of plants in shades
of emerald green. There are weedy stalks, thin wispy grasses and
other smaller plants with heart-shaped, lobed and pinnate leaves.
Two tiny pink blossoms lie alone off to the side. Revealing a
small world in all of its thriving impermanence, Red Meadow
is a splendid piece of visionary botanical art. Dubinskis' detailed
and spatially compressed drawings on papyrus are reminiscent of
illuminated studies, and are also quite handsome. Bursting with
life, On the Fence (26 inches by 18 1/2 inches) holds two
long, curved ailanthus branches with dozens of tiny unfurling
leaves, and Funnel Web (13 inches by 17 inches) packs in
an intricate clump of weeds, grasses, and spider webs with a simple
gold ring below it -- a homage to lost things.
Not to be overlooked, Dubinskis' seven
fine figurative paintings (made in 2000) in the show serve as
a reference point for where Dubinskis has traveled in her newer
work. Her human subjects, mostly family and friends, look like
specimens themselves and are framed by flat, stark backgrounds.
In Kathryn (43 1/2 inches
by 30 inches), Dubinskis juxtaposed two sections of witch grass
and a back view of a standing female figure in fuchsia and olive-green
against a rich yellow-gold ground. Reverie (33 1/4 inches
by 24 1/4 inches) shows a woman thoughtfully looking downward,
against a background of confetti paper and witch grass drawn on
Mylar. Dubinskis invests her human subjects with contained and
unexpressed emotions, and the unexpected appearance of weeds on
that bare stage is disconcerting, like nature itself. By scrupulously
studying and disclosing them, Anda Dubinskis, in her impressive
new work, makes nature and the ordinary world around us suddenly
strange and marvelous.
-Susan
Hagen, May 2002
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