Commentaries
Nancy Storrow's drawings in Seen/Not Seen take one to a world before words, where things have not yet been named. The abstract imagery comes from actions of the hand, directed by a different way of seeking — feeling — knowing, that originates in the body. The activity in the drawings does not take place center stage. Rather, it hunkers down in a corner of the rectangle, where a vulnerable circling of tone and movement draws comfort from the off-center placement on the page. I take a visceral journey with her and wander about the swirls and layers, - opaque, transparent and gestural.
Within this fragile tangle, things are given and taken away. She does not present us with a solid form because it is not about the form, but the process of her inner conversation. The viewer can witness the conversation after the fact but never enter into it. We are each in our own world of the body. As we reach out to mark our experience, only a hint of it registers, a cry for connection. Storrow is a master colorist, evoking emotion with the juxtaposition of hues, which are there and not there. In these drawings, thin lines of green, blue, purple, brown, and rust entwine like nerve fibers at the center of edgeless puffs.
Daria Dorosh May 23, 2008
On viewing Nancy Storrow's Drawings
Rain falls. An erasure is made.
Four lines bend as threads upward.
Wavering in inaudible sounds.
A thicket leans, splays, closes its
density. No horizon here. Only
conversation. The air hums
from whence to where.
Eyes move to an upper window.
An owl passes in slow motion
her heart flies beyond any rim.
Pencils slip from fingers no longer
hers, fall into nothingness.
Spaces widen, await.
In her hand a pod is held day
after day. On an August morning
it relinquishes its colors. She
dips, cannot stop, respects and
keeps the emptied pod. A concrete
form moves on its shelf. What was
in shadow, voices from whence, to here.
Ann Stokes, 1995
The simplest of transactions in painting is the application of pigment to a surface, and the most elemental communicator between minds is the sign or symbol. In essence, a Storrow painting is only a sign or symbol on a ground. The art of it lies in the eloquence with which these parts are invented and combined, but much of the strength comes from the artist’s insistence on clarity. In these luminous works, which seem to have been breathed into existence, a free impulsive complexity is built on a clear foundation, a foundation that replays for us some fundamentals of being.
Storrow has pared her expression down to three elements. Her art is like chamber music, a purposeful harmony within which the autonomy of each instrument flourishes.
The starting point, the patient appreciation of the rectangle of white vellum, remains vital in the finished piece. It is not overwhelmed, a mere background, nor made spongy and meaningless by uncontrolled spatial illusionism. With casual virtuosity the translucent whiteness is cherished, the surface tightened and enhanced by the markings on it.
The second element I think of as the message, the ostensible motive of the work. This takes the form of a simple descriptive drawing, a single, self-contained image. Whether it be a cryptic ideogram, a memory of an insect, or some other thing, the image has its own integrity as a piece of actual information, an outsider in the formal world of art interactions. The inclusion of this self-absorbed information is somehow unexpected, a clue where a decoration might have been expected. A literal meaning is of course, far from the artist’s intentions, yet the obsessive intensity of the mark alerts us; something of importance is going on.
The third actor in the drama is the mediator, who intercedes between the radiant, but passive ground and the willful image. Soft, yet distinct strokes, charged with feeling, both support the image and give substance to the ground. Like the chorus in a Greek play, they are ever present; not actors, yet acting, surrounding, commenting. Some of the actions are penetratingly personal: in Sunnyside she has dipped her five fingers in paint and swept them across the field in a gesture that feels like anguish.
There is a quality arising from this economy of means that is anything but terse. Storrow marshals powerful poetic forces; symbol, sign, depiction and abstraction, and holds them together with an easy lyrical virtuosity. The concise haiku of her paintings carry authority within. These are interior works, the path of the meditative mind revealed.
Art, by definition, is obliged to connect to life. A Storrow painting is intensely lifelike in the best sense. It does not imitate: it is a metaphorical parallel that illuminates.
David Rohn
Artist
March, 2002