This month in the Tombaugh Art Gallery
The Gallery presents “Arcs and Echoes” by contemporary painter Jill Somoza for February. The exhibit will run through Mar 2.
Jill was born in London in 1941 but lived in Germany until she was 15, enjoying paintings by artists like Emile Nolde and Max Beckman. When she first saw paintings by Jackson Pollock and De Kooning her first year in college, she was struck by the raw emotion and the great vitality in those paintings and the “feel’ of the color in its drips and brush strokes. Twenty years later she was similarly moved by the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg who seemed to strew images around in his paintings without concern for any sense of pictorial reality. Due to his method of transferring images, they had an interesting ephemeral quality which attracted Somoza.
When she began to paint on vinyl instead of canvas or paper, she liked the translucency the vinyl gave her, capturing some of the ephemeral feel she identified in Rauschenberg in this new material. She did transfer images in the beginning, but then noticed that when she changed the shape of her paintings from rectangular to odd, the figurative element she seemed to want, was taken care of by the shape of the painting. The unusualness of the shape also helped to reinforce the idea of the painting as a thing in itself, rather than a representation of something.
The pieces chosen for this show were all done in the past two years. Before this she played more with overlapping panels, something she does less often now, opting for a more simple line. The curved wood has added another dimension in its simple line as well as for the shadow it casts. These paintings are probably more accurately elaborate sketches of fleeting feelings, drawn in wood, vinyl, color and line.
The Tombaugh Art Gallery is located at 2000 S. Solano and is open on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 10 am until 2 pm.
