Block party

Mary Nicholson-Durkee celebrates family and humanity -- Cubist style

by Leon Nigrosh

MARY NICHOLSON-DURKEE: PAINTINGS AND MONOPRINTS At Surroundings Gallery, 377 Main Street, Gardner, through June 12.

It takes maturity and time for most contemporary American painters to loosen up. Just look at Jackson Pollock's work.While studying with Thomas Hart Benton, Pollack emulated Benton's robust style; he then worked through the Mexican symbolic influence of Orozco, and then on to Cubism, before he finally developed his own inimitable style -- totally abstract action painting. But Ashburnham painter Nancy Nicholson-Durkee is doing just the reverse -- going from the indefinite to the particular.

Nicholson-Durkee's exhibition at Surroundings Gallery, in Gardner, is a distillation of her recent paintings. In one of her earliest works, a 40x42" untitled canvas, she paints Abstract Expressionism -- swaths of transparent blues, pinks, and yellows across her meager pencil sketch of a table, chair, and a dress, finishing the hem with a stained effect similar to color-field canvases of Helen Frankenthaler. The table is viewed from above, Cubist style, while the upright-chair back could be perceived as a guitar (another nod to Cubism?). Soon after, Nicholson-Durkee created another large canvas, Ease, in the same blocky, segmented manner with wide, overlapping layers of patchy color. She introduced collaged bits of tissue that lend textured accents to the extended figure of a young girl animatedly swinging from a crossbar.

Collage is more pronounced in her next series of smaller paintings. Employing cut pieces from architectural plans, she arranged them within a pronounced rectilinear framework, and then painted over these patterns, keeping the paint thin. In her 18x24" Picnic this technique is used to good effect as it defines her subjects' clothing. Though another, more dramatic change has taken place and evident in Picnic. Instead of the earlier gauzy rendition of her subjects, Nicholson-Durkee articulated them with greater attention -- think Paul Cézanne. The apples and oranges placed on the blanket before a mother and child are rendered in nearly identical chiaroscuro as those in Cézanne's recently auctioned Still Life with Curtain, Pitcher, and Bowl of Fruit.

Mother and Child, from Nicholson-Durkee's same series, creates a similar tender moment, only this time indoors. It too relies on an obvious block-plan layout that subdivides the colors as well as the subject matter, creating an odd -- but not unpleasant -- perspective view. A smaller, third work concentrates on the mother figure -- soft, rounded, pastel hued, and dreamy. This quality is present in each of the paintings of the group -- and made even more so dreamy because the characters are faceless.

The latest pictures in this exhibit have made the final leap to portraiture, with features that resemble the actual sitters. In a 24x36" untitled work, Nicholson-Durkee has cleverly clothed her subject in a Butterick dress pattern, which she then boldly overpainted in rich transparent umber and ochre. As if to make this voyage from abstraction to representation complete, Nicholson-Durkee even includes her sitter's name in the title Portrait of Moses Calypso. Here we see a muscular young African-American, with trim beard and mustache, exuding an air of self-confidence. Still working within her block plan, she has set her subject off against the rectangle of a painted sunrise and dove, with a vase of fresh flowers intruding from another segment. These disparate images present a cohesive statement about the relationship between strength and beauty in nature.

In fact, all of Nicholson-Durkee's paintings deal with relationships beyond the aesthetic issues of color, space, and composition. The depiction of dresses, the mother/child images, and the use of architectural blueprint snippets and collaged dress patterns display her enduring perceptions of humanity and of family. Through her paintings, she has attempted to share these beliefs with us.

Surroundings Gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call (978) 630-2340.