Kathleen Dunne Paintings

ART BAR MOLINAR

Kathleen Dunne

Dunne's Studio in Italy

As a playful exercise, Dunne sometimes paints in passages of pure light, often excluding any but the smallest element of darkness. At other times, she reverses the process by surrounding a single, illuminated shape with foreboding darkness. Her lyricism lies in the movement of the viewer's eye. If one listens closely, her compositions are amazingly musical. Her deep, intuitive understanding of the intricate refractions taking place within luminous, shifting tonalities is breathtaking. The eye moves through the high notes of melodies of thin translucent glazes into rich tones of textured pigment, resounding, like an organ fugue into unexpected juxtapositions of colors and forms, that, only a moment before, were simply unimaginable. And the gathering and summation of these lyric instruments is orchestrated by a master conductor of unpretentious genius.

In her landscapes, the land is stylized, flattened, and simplified into what one might expect to be mere surface, but instead, her process of abstraction, the act of eliminating all that is non-essential, creates a depth of inner vision of 'essence of land' rarely realized in pictorial art. It has roots and references to the geometry and translucencies of Llyonel Feininger and the two known landscapes on Amedeo Modigliani (who, in turn, was beholden to the landscapes of Paul Cezanne) but, as time progresses, her uniqueness and strength become more and more apparent.

Chronologically, Dunne is not a young painter, she was born in 1933, but her paintings contain a youthful vigor seldom seen in works by younger artists. It is a vigor and freshness which combines itself in an absolutely unaffected way with the sure and knowing hand of a well-practiced magician.

Molinar Gallery is proud to represent Kathleen Dunne in Tiburon, CA

2008