Real - Impressions at the Palette and Chisel Academy

Donna J. West

“Gracious”, my favorite painting by Donna J. West , seems to record an ecstatic moment – like the breathless aftermath of a paint-gun fight or the Hindu festival of Holi.  There are bursts and slaps and smears of color.   Her figurative work, however, reflects the life of young women finding their way in the big city.  In accord with her career in activewear fashion, West depicts the stroll of stylish young models.   They are slim and vigorous  - but there is also a  sense of anxiety, tension, and emptiness.  They are trying, perhaps too hard, to appear carefree.  Most of them are faceless mannequins, and if they have a face,  it feels disjointed or the eyes are concealed by dark glasses.  The paint is too thick and chalky. The colors are annoying and discordant. The drawing is angular and jagged.   The same is true of her floral still-lifes.  They are more about the conventional idea that flowers are supposed to be pleasing than the luxuriant growth of actual foliage.  Beneath the surface of all her work, there are the ripples of edges  painted over – echoing  much struggle and effort .  It takes hard work to appear casual and attractive– and West documents that corner of modern, urban life.

Stephanie Weidner

There is a different kind of tension in the paintings of Stephanie Weidner.  In her best work, she offers the perfect depiction of a world that is just a little strange.  Not as strange as a surrealist like Magritte might make it – but strange in an ordinary kind of way.  As when she depicts a twisty, sinuous  vine erupting from a  squat, solid vase. Or a maze of tree roots hovering over a neatly folded tablecloth. Or a flight formation of large-winged insects pinned against a checkered cloth.  Or a red vase painted beside a gray oil can that might suggest a conventional married couple: the woman tall elegant and poetic ; the man  squat, strong, and  practical.  And then there’s the totally weird “Dragon with Craspedia” – a larger work where the stability established by a solid  black vase seems threatened by a whimsical dragon emerging from a printed pattern behind it.   Weidner is not familiar with Chicago legend, Gertrude Abercrombie, but their odd, careful, claustrophobic work has much in common



“Real /Impression” is the name that  Weidner and West have chosen to denote how their styles differ. At the Palette and Chisel Academy, where they met and are now showing, one might indeed find two ongoing traditions being taught.  One group is inspired by the object-centered realism perfected by the Seventeenth Century Dutch masters.  Another group is inspired by that emphasis on light and expressive  brushstroke pioneered in nineteenth Century Paris.  But Weidner is more concerned with the mysteries of an inner world than with the perfection of an outer one.  And West is more about the drama of life in Chicago than with how light falls on a garden.  The two still make for a good contrast, though, and good examples of what contemporary painters are doing outside the contemporary artworld.

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Responding to my suggestion that her painting resembled that of Gertrude Abercombrie,  Stephanie sent me the above images.

She painted the cat on the left -- Abercrombie did the one on the right.