Critics review – gold leaf paintings

Gold leaf paintings by Nancy Reyner, were on view at the Beth Urdang Gallery, Boston, MA and received the following review in the critics pics section of the Boston Globe.
 

Gold brightens up the darkest days of the year at Beth Urdang Gallery, where Nancy Reyner and Charlotte Andry Gibbs make liberal use of it in their paintings. Catch one of Reyner’s landscapes hanging in the gallery’s window on a sunny day, and it dazzles. But each artist is after more than that betwitching gleam – too much light and it interrupts the experience of looking.

Reyner lays on squares of gold leaf, then paints over them. In the mountainous “Lava and Blue Lake,” she applies the paint delicately, and in many ways. There are banks of cottony white clouds that look as though they were puffed on through straw, vapors of green, and swipes of powder blue. These all conspire to create deep space, middle ground, and surface adornments. Sometimes the gold erupts through; sometimes it’s a warm, almost coppery backdrop. There’s a suggestion, in these hallucinatory landscapes, of Asian landscape painting, but the grid of gold leaf also winks at modernism.

Gibbs focuses on iconography, using gold leaf and paint to re-create flags, corporate logos, and legendary works of art. While crafting a gold American flag, or a Coca-Cola or Chevrolet logo in gold, feels like a too obvious jab at capitalism,… read more.