Judy Russell “LEGACY”
Noho Gallery / M55
This event has ended.
One gray evening in the late ‘30s, Dr. Robert Kent Anderson was rushing to an emergency call along the banks of the Chicago River when he caught a glimpse of the subdued shimmer of the slowly moving waters and the tall smokestacks of the Kinzie Brewery. For one brief moment, he stood still while taking a mental snapshot of the austere grandeur of the industrial Midwestern landscape across the river. Then he drove off to the hospital and surgery. In remembrance of the Chicago scene he had witnessed, he painted “Kinzie.” Dr. Anderson was a neurosurgeon from his days in the Navy as a doctor on a US destroyer during the Second World War to his retirement in Chicago in the 1970s. Decades of opening human heads, looking through a surgical microscope into internal cerebral veins, and cutting deeply into the mysterious mass of neural tissue with a clip or a scalpel left him understandably detached and distant. Henry Marsh, the London neurosurgeon, wrote in his book “Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery” that a view inside an open head is ‘clearer, sharper and more brilliant than the world outside.’ While Dr. March found this true of ‘inside’ views, Dr. Anderson discovered interesting and worthwhile images in the ‘outer’ world. He immortalized those snapshots in his paintings.
Judy’s use of pastel colors and soft lines recalls the delicacy of Dr. Anderson’s paintings. Paintings of both Dr. Anderson and Ms. Russell bring to mind Charles Demuth and Helen Torr. Like Carrie Moyer, whose paintings are shown at D. C. Moore Gallery in New York, Ms. Russell sometimes paints at the unlikely juncture where Helen Frankenthaler meets Fernand Leger. The evanescent golden upper area of “Dr. Marigold’s Prescription” is stabilized by the purple lower passage. Judy’s masonite pieces that Big Rose will parade at the musical event at the gallery on February 11th are blunt and direct, in contrast to the dreamy paintings on the walls. The show includes four paintings that feature illumination by Judy’s husband, Robin.
-Marianna Winterdale and Suzanne Price
Media
Schedule
from January 31, 2017 to February 18, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-02-11 from 16:00 to 19:00