Michael Lalicki’s playful fox sculpture. (Photo: Lynn Woods)
Anita Barbour’s woodcut, Carol Zaloom’s lino print, and Roberta Sickler’s monotype of lone foxes respectively spotlit in the evening fog, glimpsed through the winter woods or scampering under the moon, capture the animal’s mysterious elusiveness and sturdy self-sufficiency. Sarah’s Mecklem’s tiny painting on wood of a white fox under a starry sky, which abstracts the forms into totems and is edged by a border of colorful triangles, summons up the mythological, reinforced by the symbolic marks etched into the small piece of roughened wood, as if were dug up from an ancient culture. The piece is loaded with elusive meaning. Michael Lalicki’s playful sculpture, in which a cat-like fox is comprised of pieces of jointed wood, catches the animal pausing mid-stride; the down-turned tail, flexed feet and tufts of hair outlined on the flat metal head imbue it with dexterity and self-conscious character, as if it is acknowledging the viewer.
Dick Crensen’s two wall pieces, entitled “Sour Grapes,” interpret Aesop’s fable in a linear tour de force made out of bent wire, while Richmond Johnson paints his fox with an extraordinary long tail. Susan Whelan’s clay figurine invests the fox with all the subtlety of a modern storybook character: wearing workman’s boots, he is dignified by the high collar of his coat and clutches a jewel-adorned walking stick or wand to his chest, with a complicated facial expression that is noble, lachrymose and just the wee bit sly.
Lisa Kairos’ diaphanous monochromatic encaustic paintings at R&F Gallery’s new show, entitled “Cartography for Daydreamers,” seem inspired by snowflakes and other details of the winter landscape, but they actually refer to the salt spray and fog of the northern California coast. Kairos lives in Half Moon Bay, not far from San Francisco. After two years of walking the bluffs she wanted to translate her sensations into paint, but found they were as much about memory as the actual place. The medium of clear encaustic proved to be the perfect vehicle in which she could express not a literal landscape, but one transformed by memory and dreams.
Each of the square paintings consists of layers of clear wax, in which various linear elements are revealed, including dense horizontal lines and striations made of graphite, which conjure up the view of the sea; vertical lines, thin and white like rain, or short and widely spaced, like notational code; netlike clusters of hexagons or other geometric forms, suggesting molecular structures. Circles, in some cases formed of metal flakes, sit on the surface, in slight relief. The water-like transparency of the medium, delicate tonalities and floating forms suggest infinite atmospheres, freed of the strictures of time and space.
Kairos, who had just finished teaching a workshop at R&F Handmade Paints, said the reference to maps in the show’s title suggest “not a device to orient you but a tool for describing a place.” Farmlands she passes on the freeway where rice is grown, a process involving the repeated burning and flooding of the fields, was also an inspiration. That human-formed landscape perhaps relates to the symmetry and precision of the forms, as well as a certain softness. Kairos said the biggest challenge in making the paintings was “controlling the wax and fusing it together” to convey “the minerality of the air.” Noting that she lives a quarter mile from the ocean, she said “when there’s a wind storm, salt crystals congeal on my windshield.” Keyed to the ephemeral substances of air, water, and ash, her paintings nonetheless convey powerful sense impressions, translating into visual terms the whiff of salt spray and clamminess of fog.
