Figurative painter Laura Ross-Paul
combines a free, neo-impressionist technique, an interest in Jungian symbols and
archetypes, and a transcendentalist’s love of nature. These elements integrate
seamlessly in “Seasons,” as her current exhibition is titled. With loose, but
never sloppy brushstrokes in oil paints and encaustic medium, she lends to her
figures a John Singer Sargent-like sense of aristocracy and idealization. Most
often her subjects are young and they are adorned in contemporary garments.
Sometimes she depicts them nude or semi-nude, allowing them to speak of
timelessness rather than Zeitgeist. Ross-Paul is inspired by the Oregon
coastline, yet her depictions of frolicking beachcombers and surfers, as in
“Wave” and “Soup,” sometimes cross the line between the halcyon and the
sentimental.
It is in her other major body of work — her forest fantasias
— that the painter’s most affecting gifts come to the fore. Her pictorial and
poetic sensibilities are activated by dappled light, tangled undergrowth, and
the interplay between fir and deciduous trees. While her ocean idylls reveal all
contours in flat, midday sunlight, her forest paintings withhold their
potentialities. Embraced in verdant habitats, teenage models, who might in
lesser hands come across as displaced mall rats, take on allusive overtones. The
skateboarder becomes a forest sprite; the girl in fifth-period algebra
transforms into a water nymph.
In “Early Spring” a shirtless boy wields
a large branch that is curved like a scythe, its contours alternately following
and bisecting the lines of the blossoming tree behind him. He is, we sense, more
than a boy holding a stick. Regarding the viewer implacably, his expression too
cagey to be serene but too beatific to be sinister, he challenges us to divine
his identity, his narrative, and the implications of his prop. This motif, the
bare-torso adolescent as angel or reaper, is a vision Ross-Paul explored for
many years, then set aside. In several other works in the current show, among
them “Spring Tangle” and “Early Fall”, she revisits this motif and finds much
fresh nuance to mine.
Another of this veteran painter’s talents is the
invention with which she communicates a mystical reverence for nature through
her handling of background atmospherics. The fiery aurora borealis in
“Celebration,” the shimmerings of water and sky in “Fall River,” the swirling
dance of snow flurries in “Scarf” and “A Light Dusting,” and the opulent
textures and pastel hues of the flower petals in “Early Spring” all create
dizzying backdrops that, rather than distracting from the foregrounds, impart a
pulsating, magical quality, heightening compositional and thematic drama. She
has written that she titled the show “Seasons” because she wanted to evoke those
imprecise moments when something changes in the air and one senses that the
season that has been is giving way to the season that is to be. It is a
phenomenon well-suited to the generous sfumato of her technique. A longtime
associate professor of painting at Portland State University and later Lewis
& Clark College, Ross-Paul recently retired from teaching, renovated her
studio, and plunged into painting full-time. The current work is her most vital
in years, invigorated by dueling impulses to portray dark mysteries and
illuminate metaphysical truths.
