Heather Horton is a Canadian figurative artist painting mostly portraiture and still life. She is represented by the Abbozzo Gallery, the Loch Gallery and the Kurbatoff Art Gallery and many of her sold and available paintings and illustrations are on display on her website. Today’s review is dedicated to the artist’s portraits.
I like these paintings for their promises of numerous pleasures. Yes, there is the basic familiar satisfaction in watching still life unfold on the panel, — pleasure of the aesthetic kind, simply put, the one which every art lover grows to appreciate with time. However, here its edge dulls somewhat in the presence of the other delights. The first one is that of botanical exploration and discovery: depictions of an inside section of the vegetable and the fruit echoes methodical illustrations from scientific periodicals and publications. The second one is of a culinary sort, namely the recognition of the subjects as potential ingredients. It seems as though the knife that split those figs and artichokes has also divided our attention between those additional layers of visual interpretation and association.
Although these obsolete mechanisms were designed for purposes that to some may seem opposing — a conversation with oneself (and the audience) when using the typewriter and a conversation with a different person while talking on a phone — they were both, nevertheless, used as a means of communication. Circles embody that kinship, the geometrical figure being a prevalent visual motif in both pieces. The small circles in both instruments include letters; to be touched and pressed by our fingertips, they point to language as the real communication cord that links us together and allows the exchange of information. In a way, the ostensibly highlighted form in which the letters appear on or below the moving parts of the devices reminds of the progress that language allowed us, as a species, to make. These paintings, depicting tools no longer in use, but once representing that progress, prompt to evaluate the transient nature of technology, and it’s ultimate debt to language, either written or spoken.
M Collier is an American artist based in California, who paints mostly still life. Browsing M’s blog is not unlike doing detective work: one witnesses how during the course of almost two years the artist’s style gradually shifts from realism to hyper-realism — without clearly fitting into either of the two, and making some unexpected stops along the way. Palette and focus sharpen; lines, soft and at times slightly blurred in earlier works, incise the surface with a scalpel precision in latest. But it cannot be simply said that the artist grew more proficient with time. What I see is a deliberate and careful search for an individual style, which might mix a number of trends, in a trial and error method, and would eventually constitute the optimal amalgam for the artist.
Cows are sizable animals, yet in two of these paintings the artist makes them appear small. This contrast characterizes them as helpless, as if a part of a machine controlled by an invisible giant, possibly a tyrant. We realize that the machine is the cattle industry whereas the giant is the man behind it. I think that in this setting the images will elicit different emotions from different people: remorse and pity from some, curiosity and indifference from others. I don’t think, however, that the artist intended to judge the audience. Instead he focuses solely on the theme; he presents his inarticulate models as either content and oblivious, when in a rural environment, or, as irritated, confused and alert when in a large-scale farm or auction theater.
