Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

September 16, 2012

In The Arts: Enter the altered world of Victoria Wulff

By Philip Isaacson

Some shows strike me as compulsory, and they get reviewed. Others strike me as major efforts of their type, and they get reviewed too. A third category offers me personal enhancement, and I sometimes write about them.

A final group floats in from out of the blue. Catalogs, announcements, requests and notes from informed people nudge me in its direction and, sometimes, to pay dirt.

Take the paintings of Victoria Wulff at Studio 53 in Boothbay Harbor as an example of the last breed. An email from an old prior-to-email friend introduced Wulff as an "original, intuitive and very painterly" artist. I've seen the show, and I concur. Her work is original, obviously intuitive and fluid. It is also mystical, seductive in its narration, and often presented as a seat at a performance.

Work of its kind does not find itself into Maine galleries easily, and the closest in sympathy that I can suggest are the paintings of Robert Hamilton. Like Hamilton, Wulff stages ongoing dramas in faraway places, gives them imponderable titles and can be lightly notational in form. Here, too, the drama can end, to be replaced by another or by nothing. It is all ephemeral.

The sense of ephemerality is accentuated by Wulff's extension of the painted narrative beyond the bounds of the canvas, up onto the beveled surfaces of her frames and then allowing it to float off into space. The frame does not enclose or furnish the work; it either enlarges it or acts as a conduit on its behalf.

In works such as "Refugio" and "Isolas," the viewer is able to maintain a sense of reality when confronting dream-altered Italian landscapes. But in "Well Meaning Miscreants Searching for Meaning to Shangrila" and "The New Dawn Ambassadors," the image is abandoned to the surreal.

In the latter -- a study in black, white and gray -- a great landscape has been vacated to indistinct dog-like forms that are made allusive, more suggested than formally expressed. But they very clearly possess the world to its rocky edges.

It's a pleasure to see invention and fantasy offered so candidly and without elaborate philosophic justification. This show does not have a formal title, but "The Altered World of Victoria Wulff" would fit nicely. 

"ACCORD" IS MAKING its eighth appearance at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York. Its special blending of fine arts with the decorative arts has given it longevity when similar efforts by others have failed.

The usual fine arts/objects exhibition is a field day for decorators, and doesn't deserve to survive. I can say this because my passions extend to anything good you can cram into a house, fine or not. In the resulting melee, the fine arts have to struggle, and the furniture usually wins out.

And so it is with fine arts/objects exhibitions. The good pictures -- if there are any -- are apologetic. They don't belong, and they know it.

The archness of this declaration does not apply to the "Accord" dynasty. In its seven previous manifestations -- this one is formally titled "Accord VIII" -- the show established itself as a polite flirtation between bygone vernacular culture and modern art. It sought out visual parallels between the 18th- and early 19th-century physical culture of Maine and the imagery of contemporary regional artists.

It didn't propose a discourse between an 18th-century black banister back side chair and the slashes of geometric modernism, and didn't imply that Maine painters were even aware of such chairs. It was content to show a parallel of attitudes -- the discipline of early Calvinist Maine and, say, the discipline of intellectualized modernism. At least, that's what I came away with.

(Continued on page 2)

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