Boundary Crossings

Landscapes from Michigan and Beyond

Martha Rock Keller
acrylic on canvas

April 29 - May 31, 2003

Opening Reception:

Friday, May 2nd, 7-9 pm

Gallery Talk:

Friday, May 9th, 7 pm

This exhibit of free flowing landscapes by Martha Rock Keller reveals the immediacy of this Ann Arbor artist's approach to painting. Always exciting, often astounding, Ms. Keller's brushstrokes sweep across the surface with a freedom that few contemporary artists possess.

Beginning with on-site studies, Ms. Keller sketches on the canvas with charcoal and dilute paint deliberately blurring the image. Working the figure and the ground simultaneously, she creates a surface that remains wet, allowing her images to stay fluent. She allows her edges to move and to change, expanding the forms into the space of the format or vice versa, keeping her work fresh and flexible.

Ms. Keller says about her work, "These paintings are about metaphorical edges and limits and mutable boundaries...they reflect my wonder at the bluffs and bays and mountains and valleys I've seen while traveling in Michigan and in Europe. More than that, they explore consciousness -- my own and what I perceive as the viewer's. While painting I see myself think and I try to achieve a meditative state of consciousness that I find simultaneously calm and ecstatic."

Martha Keller received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 1969 and is currently an adjunct assistant professor there. Her work has been shown in Tubingen, Germany; at the United Nations Conference on Women, Nairobi, Kenya; and throughout Michigan. Ms. Keller has recently become an artist-member of the Washington Street Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There will be a reception to meet the artist at the gallery on Friday evening, May 2nd, from 7-9 pm and a gallery talk by the artist on Friday evening, May 9, at 7 pm.

Bluffs and Bays Series by Martha Rock Keller

Sleeping Bear Dunes: Empire Bluff
acrylic on canvas
66"h x 42"w x 2-1/2"

Sleeping Bear Dunes: Sleeping Bear Bluff
acrylic on canvas
66"h x 42"w x 2-1/2"

Statement by Martha Rock Keller about the six-panel series of paintings of Bluffs and Bays at Washington Street Gallery, May 2003:

This series of Bluffs and Bays, inspired originally by the magnificent bluffs at Sleeping Bear Dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan near Glen Arbor, shows bluffs and bays from sites in England, France, and Ireland as well. I try to paint the form of a bluff and its surround in wet-in-wet technique to allow a flexible boundary in the paint because I'm so concerned about how my eye (and the viewer's) moves along and crosses those boundaries. This particular concern for crossing painted visual boundaries reflects the conceptual international boundary crossings of the series of paintings as a whole. The similar horizon line is also a connecting link that crosses "boundaries".

For me, the action of the brush simulates waves in the water and the five blue pigments used hint at the amazing array of blues (and other colors) I've seen in bodies of water. Some areas of the paintings were turned upside down and inside out in an attempt to get the right "feel" of the space and form. The bluff at Collioure, for instance, was dark red, then dark blue, and is finally now a lighter mid-gray to "work" in its space and the Empire Bluff began as a view from the north rather than the south and was much larger. That bluff was my nemesis; it just wouldn't work until finally in the throes of "painting up a storm" it fell into place very simply and abstractly. Now it's my favorite of the painted bluffs and now the ultramarine of the water is darker and perhaps richer because those earlier attempts show through. This is how a painting reflects "an experience" with all its stops and starts and ups and downs. -- how art represents life itself.

A painting for me is a sea of ideas, decisions, and transformations which reflects and enhances everyday experience and how we see the natural world.

-- Martha Rock Keller

Other artists also exhibiting this month>>