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Arts
Witty take on the
urban takeover of the natural world -
May. 21, 2004
By Anne
Galloway Times
Argus Staff
A
river flows lazily through a carpet of green fields. Oversized animals – a
moose, egrets, a Canada goose, a fish – are on the scene, as iconic entities
painted somewhat apart from the landscape. Prop planes fly overhead like
levitating checkered cabs.
In the
middle of Lynn Rupe’s painting of rustic bliss is a rent in the fabric of the
earth. A crevasse forms at the juncture of the wilderness and an urban scene,
marked by skyscrapers and a traffic jam. A spheric version of the earth itself
floats in the black hole of space. In the foreground, a forest of parking
meters marches from the cityscape toward the bucolic scene. In another corner
of the huge multi-paneled canvas, cutout creatures, which Rupe refers to as
sheep, are stacked atop one another in a cube that reads like a visual fish
tank. A spiral staircase – a strand of DNA, perhaps – serves as a vertical seam
that loosely bastes together incongruent images in the painting.
The
painting, “Field Trip,” is part of a series of images that explore the urban
environment’s hostile takeover of the natural world. In other, smaller acrylic
paintings in Rupe’s new show at the Vermont Supreme Court in
As
Rupe puts it, the animals just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time. “It’s not a surreal image,” Rupe says. “The juxtaposition of those two
images makes a point. Their very presence creates a certain level of chaos. I
think it’s nice the cars are stopping.”
If it
sounds as though Rupe didn’t anticipate what was going to happen in her
painting, you’re right, she didn’t. “The painting took me on a ride,” Rupe
says. “ … When I paint things happen. I don’t really
plan.”
Rupe’s
intuitive approach gives her work an unstudied freshness. In “Expect Delays –
Rhinos” a relentless stream of cars screeches to a halt; vehicles turn every
which way as they stop in front of a family of rhinos making themselves at home
on what could be Broadway Avenue in New York City. One of the rhinos is
actually asleep.
This
theme – animals stuck in urban contexts – is played out in other scenes, with
other creatures, from different perspectives. In “Expect Delays – Elephants,”
the space Rupe creates in the cityscape is claustrophobic. Storefront windows
feature mannequins in tuxes and underwear. The elephants are outrageously out
of place, and the cars seem practically underfoot.
Rupe’s
realism is delivered with slight of hand. Her backdrops are dull fields of
gray. Everything human – the sketched out buildings, the cars rendered with
childlike black outlines filled in with primary colors – is primitive and
absurd. The creatures, on the other hand, are limned in detail.
There
are also a few of Rupe’s characteristically chaotic, freeform abstracts in the
show. “Night at the Lackawanna Opera,” for example, is like a puzzle made up of
jumbled pieces not designed to fit together. The feeling of entropy is
underscored by Rupe’s practice of jumping between stark blacks, whites and a
bright palette range. And while there is no unifying theme, the painting is
full of motifs: leaves, arcs, windows, doors, checkers, eyes, wineglasses,
torsos. In the end, the familiar and the bizarre coalesce nicely.
Lynn Rupe’s paintings are on exhibit in the lobby of the Vermont
Supreme Court through July 9. The Supreme Court is located at