Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004130185
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ann Weinstein
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Past and Future" also clearly demonstrates the transitional nature of the work in Dillard's show at the Living Gallery in North Cross School. Drips, drifts and broad-brushed areas are stabilized and differentiated not only by the new geometry, but by areas of flat color and individualized strokes, both soft and firm-edged. As its title indicates, the painting refers to time, but time as defined by a passage through place.
Some of the paintings combine interacting layers of light-defining color with grids, circles and broken but firm-edged bands of color, as if injecting human, intellectual order into natural law.
Lettering, which is another form of drawing and communication, contributes a sense of urgency to several of the paintings. It spells out an artist's lexicon, with words like pleasure, discover, create, understand, critically and radically. In a painting of the same title, the letters spell out "Abstract Art Is a Form Of Mysticism." I take Dillard to mean that, unlike representational imagery, abstract art is not a matter of learned or analytical knowledge, but immediate and intuitive insight.
"Barriers to Transformation" seems to corroborate the assumption. The imagery of strong white horizontal bands visually barricading a dark amorphous background is well integrated into this transitional stage of Dillard's work. But the title indicates a certain frustration on the artist's part at no longer being able to dissolve into misty, or mystic auras.
"Cedar Ridge," a contained, five-part realistic landscape painted in local color, seems altogether inappropriate to this show unless it is intended to demonstrate the source of Dillard's inspiration, her perceptions, feelings, ideas.
"Caution Is the Enemy" is not the most cohesive image in the show, but its title endows it - and the show - with courage. I'm crazy about the notion. It's got real attitude.
The show runs through April 27. North Cross School, 4254 Colonial Ave. S.W., is open during school hours.
\ Kathy Pinkerton's handmade paper dragon arcs and snakes its way across the walls of the Arts Council's window at 20 E. Church Ave. An elephant and dolphins, stars and fishes, sunrise and watery depths, Icarus and dancing figures play in its lilting rhythms and life-flow.
Wide bands of dark paper, bright with all-over drippy squiggles, ripple along the floor. Strewn on the floor, curled paper streamers made of Pinkerton's basic material dispel any possible doubt that this is a celebration.
Pinkertons' work can be seen in the window through May 10.
\ Several dozen poems and four thousand drawings by children were found, after World War II, hidden away in Terezin, an old fortress town in Czechoslovakia that the Nazis turned into a concentration camp and cynically called the "Paradise Ghetto." For those prisoners who did not die there, it was a stop on the way to annihilation in death camps farther east.
Twenty-two of the drawings (and 13 explanatory panels) are in a show called "Image and Reality: Jewish Life in Terezin," sponsored by the B'nai B'rith Klutznick Museum in Washington, D.C., and showing at the Roanoke Valley History Museum.
The children used watercolor, pencil, chalk, collage and, in one unexpected geometric design, cut paper. Their scrap materials included the back of printed Nazi forms. Some of the pictures are childlike: flowers, butterflies, balloons, a playground, a village and church, and children sitting around a table. Or children seated at a table in a dark, grim barracks. Some, like "Courtyard," are claustrophobic or, like "Junction," too empty. The collages are relatively sophisticated.
There is no way I am going to critique the work of cruelly murdered children. Their work is a celebration of life - a tribute to their spirit and to that of their elders in the face of brutal dehumanization. Their names - those who died and the few who survived - constitute a list of honor.
Of the 15,000 children deported to Terezin from all over Europe, fewer than 100 survived. So much for trains that run on time.
The Roanoke Valley History Museum, Center in the Square, is open Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. and Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is a museum entrance fee of $1 for adults, 75 cents for seniors and 50 cents for children.
by CNB