On Carol Barsha
by Jean Lawlor Cohen
January 2009
Carol Barsha starts with familiar things, launches them into seas of color and follows wherever they lead. That's been her method for years now: depicting objects that intrigue even as they suggest some mythic design or power. Her two recent series, inspired by birds' nests and tape rolls, share not just an underlying circular pattern but the given elegance of "form follows function."
In the past, Barsha's oil paintings entered realms of fantasy and dream. Human heads erupted in Pentecostal flames; hotel beds floated heavenward on wings. Critics found in these works allusions to psychological states, homage to Renaissance painting, musings on mortality, even a yearning for Old Testament-like revelation. What led them to such readings was often the presence of figures, some human, some angelic.
At one point, the boat became her dominant subject matter. Over several years, she navigated that image around and beyond its automatic references-spiritual rescue, the passage of life, Valhalla-bound coffins. Although some vessels appear to float beneath a scrim of calligraphy (is this Holy Writ?), others turn bow-to-picture-plane and allow an aerial peek into what they contain-pointillist shapes that radiate an irrational glow. Prophetic stance co-exists with visual delight.
Beds and small boats, of course, imply the human form, just as the cross derives from the limbs and scale of a human body. But with her latest work, Barsha seems to have moved beyond such anatomical dictation. Now her fascination with the nature of things takes on a certain purity. The innate artistry of nest-building birds, the logical coiling of household tape...both present configurations of perfected order.
Religious faith itself calls for finding beauty and meaning in the objective world. Certainly these nests and tape rolls, painted in intense, stained-glass colors, push to be read as more than neutral objects. Their patterns trigger notions of the cosmos, those ordained, circling paths whose spinning creates the music of the spheres. Underlying all is the painter's assertion that "art is my form of devotion."
These new works seem to test the idea of Barsha as surrealist. Sky-blue eggs, shattered or intact, nestle in recognizable, species-specific constructions. Coils of bookbinder tape unravel in logically delineated spirals. Yet for all their exactitude, Barsha's nests and tapes occupy irrational spaces. They hover over grounds of undetermined scale, with no horizon line or perspective to guide the eye or assure the mind.
Coils spin from an open center that, in one painting, is rimmed in red and casts its own lavender to deep purple shadow. The nests, in more permutations (inks and charcoal as well as oils), appear laced with unlikely reds and, in the "wisp" series, assume the silhouette of a bird. Some nests resemble static specimens (that pristine 3-D egg, the spotted feather), while others seem to spin-a small one whirling amidst glints of sea life, a large one heading out like a galaxy into the night sky.
The most ominous work? A large charcoal drawing that depicts a mounded nest of thick "vines" reaching snakelike to the paper's edge. The most surprising? A nest of brown-ink twigs put to Arches paper in impossible colors. Set at the broader end of the nest, its profile elongated like an actual nest she found in the woods, is a photo-realistic egg. Its placement there morphs the nest's shape, when seen from a distance, into an "Egyptian" eye.
Although Barsha certainly intends no such Salvador Dali-like illusions, she unconsciously provides the possibility. She can no more control these surreal readings than she can control her intuitive processes. And why should she wish to? Her nests and coils continue to exist elegantly in the logic of their own making.
Jean Lawlor Cohen
independent curator