Mix and match

A glimpse into the private life of Frances Kornbluth

by Leon Nigrosh

FRANCES KORNBLUTH: THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION at the Paradis Art Gallery, 274 Main Street, Douglas, through May 25.

Throughout the 19th century, the nearby town of Douglas was quite well-known for the products turned out at the Douglas Axe Works and as home to America's first washing machine. Then things got kind of quiet for a long time -- until artist Jean Marie Paradis came to town. Now the joint is really jumpin' again. Paradis runs an art gallery, offers art lessons and whole-life workshops, sponsors live-music sessions and poetry readings, and is heading up Douglas's first Mardi Gras-style Summer Arts Festival on the main drag in historic East Douglas Village.

All of this energy emanates from a sedate 1810 white-painted brick building listed on the historical register as the Hunt House -- which for 10 years stood empty and had even been slated for demolition. But that's another story. Paradis restored three large downstairs rooms into bright, airy spaces, perfect for showing artwork. She is currently showcasing recent paintings and collages by fellow Art XII-er Frances Kornbluth.

Kornbluth's earliest foray into the arts started at the age of four as a piano-playing child prodigy. In the late '50s, Kornbluth studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and for years has taught art in various institutions. Although she has had little time to pursue her music playing, she still uses her innate musicality by bringing a sense of harmony and counterpoint to her work. Each of her canvases is an attempt to actively orchestrate colors, shapes, and lines into a visual lyrical balance.

Both Summerscape and Distant Garden act as large windows that open onto broad abstract landscape vistas layered in pastel tones. Using a scrubbing-brush technique, Kornbluth overlays transparent and translucent areas of color to create a sense of depth while at the same time preserving the inherent flatness of the painted surface. The same is true in her large acrylic on canvas composition Highlights. Here the colors are so pale as to appear almost nonexistent, but they expose an inner luminosity as if coming directly from the canvas itself.

Kornbluth's largest work in this exhibit is Lobster Cove Suite #2. Made up of 17 separate canvases assembled as a mosaic, this imposing work is an abstract portrait of one of her favorite summer places, which she renders in large swaths of pale greens and blues.

Kornbluth switches back and forth from painting to collage as the spirit moves her, working intuitively in each medium and, in some cases, actually combining them. Some of the collages like The Bird Sings/The Tiger Waits incorporate bits of commercial wrappings or printed type within the textural format, bringing a bit of whimsy to an otherwise formal examination of the technique. For her collage Metropolitan, Kornbluth uses a flyer from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art as the baseline in a cut, pasted, and painted architecturally organized textural layout.

Other works like Wrapped/Rapt are boldly executed color and texture combinations that derive their interest from the active placement of individual elements. Still other assemblages bridge the gap between paint and collage. In her Mixed Messages, Kornbluth effectively combines bits and pieces of board and paper with a healthy dose of thick paint of differing hues but similar value, to present a circular, rhythmic glimpse of a private world as it might be seen through a porthole.

As one moves through the spacious gallery and examines each of the 23 works, it becomes apparent that Kornbluth is very involved in the development of her compositions. The placement of each area of color, each line, and each mixed-media element is as important to the total image as every other. These activities can be quite time consuming, but because of Kornbluth's trained abilities and inborn sensibilities, through her finished creations, she makes the whole process seem pleasantly artless.

The Paradis Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. Call 476-1787.