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Picture perfect

Reviving realism at the Danforth

by Leon Nigrosh

STILL LIFE AND PORTRAITS at the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Avenue, Framingham, through May 11.

Fruit so lush you can almost taste it. Flowers in full bloom, bursting with color. Faces alive with sparkling eyes. These are just some of the artistic marvels that dominate the walls of the Danforth Museum of Art. Guest curator Helen Shlein has selected 21 paintings by three of the area's best-known portrait and still-life artists. Collectively, the work is ample evidence that realism is alive and well as we approach the 21st century. Individually, the canvases and panels are breathtaking examples of the artistic talent possessed by the trio.

Frances Gillespie knew she wanted to be an artist since the third grade and that realism was her passion. Formal art training, study in Europe, and a first-hand knowledge of Brueghel and Vermeer became a religious experience for her. Painting 40 hours a week in her studio, working and reworking her large canvases until she has "gone as far as I can go," Gillespie combines flowers, figures, and abstract patterns into works such as Portrait of Kathy. This six-foot-tall oil on canvas is a meticulous representation of an African-American friend, accurate to the wrinkles on her feet. A flower-filled Chinese vase and oval mirror offer compositional counterpoint. But wait, there's a twist -- the reflected image in the mirror.

Marci Gintis used to paint with watercolors, but her attraction to 15th-century Italian art prompted a shift to the ancient medium of egg tempera. The technique is just as it sounds, separated egg yolks act as the emulsion into which powdered pigments are mixed. Because this mixture dries rapidly, she has to work quickly and continuously overpaint her images to bring up the chosen colors. This technique of layering also helps create the illusion of three-dimensionality so prevalent in Gintis's work. Her 1992 Three Peaches is so rotund and tinted with blush that the fruit looks good enough to eat.

As Gintis became more adept with her painting method, her still lifes became even more realistic. Her Cantaloupe and Crabapples is a tour de force of trompe l'oeil with the fruit appearing to spill from a shadowbox frame. She now makes portions of her work three-dimensional, employing plaster and modeling paste to build framing accents that gradually blend into the panel surface, a technique that is evident in her Baroque rendition of Six Walnuts. Paying further homage to the past, she uses lavish amounts of gold leaf on her framing elements.

Gintis's most ambitious work in this exhibit is her altar-sized Ethnic Cleansing: Portrait of Ajka Hodzic. It is hard to tell where the true dimensionality ends and the illusion begins. Spires, a lightbulb and its nearby switch, a wrinkled cloth draped over the predella strewn with cherubim (or are they dead babies?) all serve to enshrine a crying woman -- whose tears dissolve her image into running rivers of paint.

The grande dame of the group, Barbara Swan, has been playing visual tricks on us for years with her adroitly painted canvases. Using subdued tones, she lures us into her pictures of water-filled jars, mirrors, and photo snippets. Her Faces takes us through a fun-filled maze of self-portrait images, some reflected in mirrors, others refracted through glass jars, and still others appearing as photos. In The Artist's Eye, Swan reflects and refracts a painted likeness of Van Gogh's self-portrait through her ubiquitous glass water jars. Even in Roller Coaster, Fasten the Hat, which makes a reference to historical paintings, patterns and images are playfully distorted, yet appear accurately rendered.

Swan deals with all the issues typical of contemporary painters, color, form, composition, abstraction, and light, but it is her ability to make us believe that we are looking at objects that have been bent by cylinders of water and cut or foreshortened by mirrors that makes her softly illuminated paintings so attractive.

The Danforth Museum of Art is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call 620-0050.