Romano Gallery Features Still Life Paintings by Paula Heisen & Lynn Kotula

	Paula Heisen, Shells, oil on linen, 18" x 30", 2007
	Lynn Kotula, Yellow Watering Can, oil on canvas, 25" x 37", 2006

The artists explain, “Strategic maneuvers, engaging fun, a drama or comedy on stage – the word “play” means all these things in our paintings.” Each artist works with a set of familiar objects to create her still life tableaus. Kotula’s set-ups are the characters that form the exquisite geometry of her painterly storytelling. Heisen’s imagery relies on shells, coral and objects of animals, fish, and reptiles to create a fantastical world, which is rendered with a deadpan sense of humor.

Kotula, who earned an M.F.A. in painting from Parsons School of Design and a B.A. in history/art history from Douglass College, Rutgers University, explained, “I have always painted from observation. I started painting in the landscape. I liked being outdoors in the midst of my painting and racing the light before it changed and rearranged the colors and shapes I’d struggled to find. Those landscape paintings were quite small and long, a row of trees with a house in the middle distance – a whole world in 18 inches. But I soon succumbed to New York’s winters and stayed indoors, where I set up still life arrangements, thinking of them as necessary substitutes for the landscape. I discovered that I liked finding the shapes and colors in the forms of vegetables, boxes and cloth, from which I could construct “landscapes” of my own devising. And as much as I relished the breathless hurry of my landscapes, I loved the slower pace that my still life provided.”

Kotula added, “I still paint in the landscape, though I’m most at home in my studio. Wherever I am, what compels me is exploring the tension between what I see and what I hope to reveal on the painting’s flat surface, between the 3-D of the space in which I stand and the 2-D world of the canvas. I want to paint paintings in which each gesture – color or line – has multiple meanings: the ochre does more than name the ‘pear’ – it has a relationship with a yellow, or red or green; it’s color and drawing; the purple in the shapey shadow describes something that I see and can name and pushes against the ochre. I just love the transformation of the seen into the language of color and shape. I want my paintings to tell the non-verbal stories that painting can tell.”

Heisen, who earned an M.F.A. from Yale University, School of Art, and a B.A. from UC Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies, stated, “I started to paint from the still life as a winter month strategy to keep working. Gradually, because of the contemplative nature of the activity, it became my sole interest. My first impulse was to create set-ups that approximated the garden that had been my subject. Then, about fifteen years ago, I introduced a happy face doll into one of my paintings, which reawakened my interest in narrative painting. That earlier interest had been doomed by my frustration and boredom with the static nature of working from sketches and photographs for figure compositions. The ideas for my still life set-ups come from many sources: a chance phrase or song lyric, an object I might see or buy, an image I’ve seen in a museum or the desire to revisit the experience of a place or time. Often there are narratives, though the ‘stories’ aren’t always clear even to me, and many times refer to states of mind rather than events. I have an extensive collection of objects – shells, coral, dolls, masks, vases, fabric, plastic and wooden animals of all kinds, plastic human organs and so on. Creating the set-ups is an important part of the process for me: I go into a trance-like state, and the painting takes form in my mind as I arrange the objects, table and fabric.

Heisen added, “Since 2001, I have painted views of the New York City skyline from my studio windows many times. That skyline has many meanings for me and now, after 2001, it is invested with a sense of vulnerability. I moved to my first studio with northern light exposure in 2001, and found that the quality of the light reminded me of California, where I grew up. It’s not warm and sunny, but it is even and consistent. The cool, close tones of my paintings reflect that light. Imagery based on the sea has also been a recurring theme for me, especially after a snorkeling trip in 2004. For some reason, when the sea and the skyline come together in my paintings, my life feels in order. There is both an intense pleasure in painting directly from life and a strange calmness in connecting to what I see. But it is the ability to access my psychic energy that makes still life painting so satisfying to me.”

View the exhibition’s Web site at: http://www.tabletopplay.info

Posted 3/9/07

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