Shade of gray

Teri Malo's rocky landscapes remind us of New England's charm

by Leon Nigrosh

BEYOND A VIEW: THE LANDSCAPE DRAWINGS AND POETRY OF TERI MALO At the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Avenue, Framingham, through November 7.

Like the immigrants who populated early New England, many of the rocks and boulders here traveled from other regions. Over the centuries, wind, water, and glaciers displaced stones, and colonists, too, had a hand in moving them, building walls, erecting cairns, cutting quarries.

Artist Teri Malo is so taken with this phenomenon that for the past six years she has created nearly a hundred landscape drawings that share her vision. For the current exhibition at the Danforth Museum of Art, she has selected 38 charcoal and graphite works that represent her trips into the wilderness. She first sets the stage -- in the center of the gallery, in fact -- by arranging groups of rocks on a crushed-gravel island; the stones were taken from places she has visited, including Arcadia National Park, Mount Washington, Plymouth, nearby Purgatory Chasm and along the Blackstone Valley corridor.

The strength of her drawings rests largely on the whiteness of the perceived light as it plays against the gray. Malo achieves this rich quality through first designing abstracts of gray tones, which are applied either by dabbing powdered charcoal over the paper, or by sprinkling a monoprint with finely powdered graphite that is then run through a press. From there, she heavily works the surface with erasers, bringing up the paper's original whiteness as she begins to define her images. By finely delineating these abstract underpinnings with thousands of individual pencil marks, Malo eventually brings about a recognizable landscape.

One such works is Plymouth Rocks, a moody view of a barren space that, evidenced by the placement of the boulders, was once an active farm. The patterns in the distance and the shadowy tress frame clusters of stone that create a hollow in the center of the drawing. While there is a sense of loss inherent in this image, there is also a sense of wonder. Another example is Humpback, an interpretation of the large granite outcropping in Purgatory Chasm. Malo takes advantage of the craggy split stones to develop an interplay of bright light and deep shadow, made even more dramatic by judicious use of her eraser and myriad pencil marks. She further enhances this drawing, along with many others in the exhibit, by displaying a poem she wrote, which was inspired by the finished work. In this poem, Home, she muses about cut trees and glacially split rock, ending with the line, "Sawdust and Grit -- New England."

Malo developed this idea of contemporary poems and drawings in part from her admiration of Wang Wei (699-759), a Buddhist monk from China's T'ang Dynasty. He was the first painter to treat landscape paintings as evocations of nature, and not just colorful decoration. In fact, he developed a monochromatic ink-painting style in which he employed multiple small brush strokes. He also was revered for his poems about nature.

Like Wang Wei and many early Japanese artists, Malo relies on what is left out of her drawing, referring to this technique as "the art of removal." The slashing white strips that race through the small fir trees and across the page help to produce the feeling of desolation in Where Soil Is Scant. And in Dance the few dried leaves appear nearly wind-blown out of the otherwise blank frame.

As both her affection for, and her knowledge of, nature has increased, Malo has turned her artistic efforts toward reclaiming nature -- specifically the Blackstone River Valley. Eight of her drawings in this exhibit, including the forest vale But No Air Stirs and the shadowy glade in By Meadow Pond, are interpretations of pristine points along the river. Malo also has organized the Blackstone Valley Project, a collaborative research and exhibition program to encourage awareness of the historical corridor. As Malo continues to develop and exhibit her series of unique landscape drawings, perhaps her involvement with nature will encourage us to take another look at our surroundings and discover their mysteries.

The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Call 620-0050.