Catherine Kehoe at Barton/Ryan - Boston - Brief Article

Catherine Kehoe's small oil-on-wood portraits and figure studies, all dated 2000, have a liquid, nostalgic quality. Partly it is their intimate scale--the largest is only 6 by 8 inches--that makes them seem like high-contrast, slightly out-of-focus color snapshots. Partly it is Kehoe's lush, somewhat retro painterly style, akin to that of early 20th-century American Impressionists such as Charles Hawthorne, whose true subject was light-created forms, with human representation almost a by-product. Kehoe's broad brushstrokes reduce the surfaces and modeling of her subjects to angular planes of lights and darks.

The portraits are unprepossessing and studylike: simple renderings, from the tops of shoulders up, of heads seen face forward, in profile or from the back. All are placed in a monochrome field of light or dark and correspondingly given shadows or bright highlights to emphasize contrasts between figure and ground. Drama in Kehoe's work comes most often from this play of light and shadow, calling to mind the famous "mud-heads" of Hawthorne's shadowed portraits, as if the viewer's eyes were sun-blinded and unable to distinguish features in shade.

The anonymity of the nude figure studies, mostly views from the back cropped just below the buttocks, lends them even more objecthood than the portraits. A female-shaped nude torso with both arms and one leg folded unseen in front becomes a stalklike shadow, the lower three-quarters in deep chiaroscuro. It is the light falling on shoulders and head that defines this as a figure. In other works, bare-backed torsos hold slightly different poses, arms akimbo, hanging or folded, head turned slightly this way or that. Together, they resemble a series of studio exercises.

One work in particular, though, has real presence, demonstrating what Kehoe might aim for once she moves beyond renderings done with deft but overly stylized and somewhat monotonous brushwork. Cheek by Jowl is a portrait of a middle-aged woman who gazes directly at the viewer. Her eyes connect, her expression is slightly challenging. Here, the sitter has substance well beyond questions of the artist's facility; our eyes are not just sorting out the clever ways paint and brushstrokes create illusions of light and form, but are arrested by a person.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group