Kate Bright at Emily Tsingou

Kate Bright's land- and seascapes are to nature what My Little Ponies are to ponies, and suggest the fanciful awe a city-bred girl might feel when first encountering nature's majesty. Bright addresses nature at its most emotional essence, yet the surface appearance of her work is less Caspar David Friedrich than Home Shopping Network. Born in Suffolk, educated at Goldsmiths and now living in London, Bright augments some of nature's most theatrically grand moments with flamboyant, theatrical touches like glitter, blue velvet and rhinestones, and by deploying the silver twinkle of pencil on black museum board to delightful effect.

Bright often paints the reflection of trees on water, and trees coated in shimmering snow. Her fourth show at Emily Tsingou gallery also included a series of seven small graphite drawings of turbulent oceans titled "Night Waves," twin velvet-and-rhine-stone representations of the stars glimmering in the night sky as seen from the North and South poles, and an acrylic-on-glass painting of the sea.

As her starting point, Bright uses kitsch imagery from Christmas cards, calendars and posters. While her images do not stray too far from the pretty but light qualities of her source material, they make compelling arguments for taking kitsch seriously. The 40-year-old painter refuses to be bogged down by heavy-handed theory or to feel obliged to subvert her subject matter's simple charm, which in itself is somewhat subversive. She seductively expresses mankind's wonder and humility at nature's marvels, for instance, with graphite markings that are disarmingly attractive. From a slight distance, they form a cohesive representational image. The waves merge and part convincingly and the overall effect is of rhythm and energy. But up close one sees that the little lines have a doodlelike quality at odds with their fidelity to the aggression of the sea in turmoil. This contradiction, between nature's power and the artist's dainty gestures, creates a conceptual conflict that transcends the pictures' apparent prettiness.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning