It’s long past time to break out the bubbly on behalf of the success of Aptos painter Ursula O’Farrell, whose star was already swiftly ascending when I was introduced to her work in 2008 in the provocative “Visual Politics” exhibition juried by revered art scholar Peter Selz at the Santa Cruz Art League. Seared into my memory was O’Farrell’s painting Flying into It, a moment caught like an intake of breath as a cataclysm erupts skyward, while in the foreground people innocently engaged in park pastimes bear witness. This dramatic work represents what I have come to see as the distinctive hand of O’Farrell: the bold, expressionistic brushwork, juicy color upon unlikely color alluding to depth and foreground; figures and their relation to each other suggested by compositional distance and direction, all creating meaning by intimating a gesture, an atmosphere, a mood.
The following year O’Farrell’s solo exhibition at Toomey Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco was so thought-provoking that I reviewed the show for Art Week in one of that publication’s final issues. More abstract, perhaps more disturbing, the multiple figures and their relationships emerge from chaotic surroundings gradually, requiring an adjustment of vision to discern foreground from background. As figures gain definition they attract meaning. Writing in the exhibition catalog, Selz deemed O’Farrell a successor to the glittering class of Bay Area Figurative Painters, calling her work “Figurative Abstraction.” But O’Farrell keeps evolving.
In “Search for Self,” now at Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery, two Santa Cruz County painters, Barbara Downs and Sefla Joseph, join O’Farrell in an evocative look at figurative painting as part of an artists’ journey of self-discovery.
Barbara Downs exhibits regionally in many styles and media; two more literal paintings are featured currently in the “Human Rights” show at Louden Nelson. At MPC, however, Downs’ loose-brushed figures are suggested and overlaid by a torrent of vigorous lines while her backgrounds are flat and simple. Sefla Joseph’s figures conjur Chagal or illustrated fables, with detailed faces, simplified shapes, vivid colors and thickly worked surfaces. Both suggest narrative within the mystery of their imagery.
Two large “still wet” O’Farrell works show a surprising move toward a more overtly realistic style. In Jig of Joy, peopled by three figures and their reflections, the space is illuminated by a glorious moment, a dance in progress suggested by a futurist-style blur. Areas of blended, flattened tone in the foreground and ceiling are as surprising a development as the fully defined figures. Yet the totality is still unmistakably O’Farrell for the mood, the palette, the handling of paint and the psychological weight of the content. The show continues at MPC Art Gallery through Dec. 17. Read more of “The Exhibitionist” at KUSP.org.
