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