word of mouth:
reviews, artist's statements, patrons' comments Resume: Page 1 Page 2
Photo: Peter Watkins, 2007
andrea gomez: artist's statement
Throughout my career, I have been advised by kindly would-be mentors, "Consistency Matters." Be consistent. Be Recognizable. They were speaking of nothing more than formal subject matter, the nouns of my paintings. I would respectfully counter with "yes but the clouds thrill me and then the human figure intrigues me and then mythic narratives and Biblical text moves me...." and on and on and on. I doubt I convinced them.
Yet there is strong consistency in my range of work. Always I am driven by contour line, and its ability to elegantly impart immeasurable description. Color and movement embody my vision; frequently temporal tensions and narrative enter the compoosition.
Truly I am excited by an array of ideas and contexts. I am a draftsman, a markmaker and would be happy to do nothing but draw with yellow Dixon-Ticonderogas or crayons or the more acceptable medium of artists' pastels. Yet also I am a painter who loves the transparency and wet mess of watercolor as well as the goo of oils. My years as an independent animator, an experimental filmmaker has made me more open, probably, to unorthodox vehicles like the graphic novel (please do not read "comic book" here), scrolls, successive imagery, flipbooks of clouds moving along the North Carolina coast or a baby entering the world.
I thank the purveyors of advice but if I were to follow it, I'd be nothing more than a spiritual wannabe, constructing my search on the tiny bits of paper inside fortune cookies. I love to dip the cookies in my tea and sometimes I even tape the paper fortunes to my bathroom mirror--but always, always I am mindful of my own reflected image staring back at me beyond the cookies' advice.
Juror's Notes from "New Works," 2003 juried exhibition of Artspace artists' work, for which Gomez won the Best in Show award. Dr. Sarah Schroth, curator, Duke University Museum of Art.
As way of introduction, I should say that the high quality and limitations of space made this show especially hard to jury. For the artists that did not make it in, remember: it is always a question of the taste of the juror, and taste is as individual as it is arbitrary. Mostly I thought, during the three hours I spent with your artworks, of the courage each of you have to do what you do--all members and affiliates are doing strong work that demands respect.
The following are first thoughts I had while choosing works for the show, based in memory, as this accident has separated my notes from me. Take what you like and leave the rest, as they say in another group setting. As I did not look at names when I judged, I will refer to the work rather than the artist.
Best of Show is awarded to the work on paper that combines old master painting skill [pigment mixture, variety of surface, emotive brushwork] with modernist draughtsmanship, which bleeds onto the second supporting sheet left uncolored. The strength in my opinion is the duality of media in combination with a complex narrative. A story is being told on many levels
here, a world of personal, interior mythology executed by a skillful artist. A daring work; it is the real thing.
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Max Halperen's review of the Divine Milieu — an exhibition of paintings at Raleigh Contemporary Gallery in January 2003 — for The News and Observer.
Andrea Gomez is one of the few painters in the area who, while working with the elements of landscape — land, water, sky — is not terrified by ideas.
The work in her show at Raleigh Contemporary Gallery — "Divine Milieu" — is linked, she says, to words and concepts floated by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who saw man as evolving toward a state of ultimate spiritual awareness and being.
For Gomez, the world, like man, is forever in motion, forever changing form and color. The atmosphere and clouds of her landscapes — if that term can be used for these paintings — often seem solid and faceted, heavier than the land beneath. But ultimately, the viewer's eye may be moved through churning clouds of deep reds, purples, blues, greens to pale evanescent regions of quiet in deep space.
The best work in the show of eight oils and one watercolor is stratified, with two low thinly painted rectangles of land and sky at the bottom and foaming cloud formations above. Thus "Jerusalem" lies on a slab of deep green that may be land or water. It supports a rising cloud that spreads and in turn supports an explosion of dark clouds rushing in from the right, while other scrolling clouds, lighter in color but heavy with paint, rise to the top of the large canvas.
In "Veiled Voice Over the Waters" a river of light flows sinuously through the canvas, separating dark red and purply clouds that are so thickly encrusted that they reach out of the canvas and are given the weight of stone. They are hemmed in by cloud forms that are lighter in color but still solid and almost faceted. Below them are two flatter areas, both horizontal: brownish land and a thinly painted sky with a kind of spout linking the land to the rearing clouds above.
The boundaries are not as clear in "Sky Over Eden," however. Underwater foliage rises above a flat rectangle of water surmounted by thick banks of cloud or land that appear to hold another region of water. Above that, a fiery cloud lies within a circle of thickly painted clouds of reds and greens. But in the center, with land, cloud and water reaching for it, an area of thinly painted greens echoes the color of the lakes below.
Whatever Chardinesque ideas and feelings may lie at the heart of these paintings, ultimately the near-Baroque twists and turns of their massive and colorful forms are quite moving and powerful declarations of the world's beauty. The Raleigh artist is not very far from the mindset of some 19th-century landscapists when she notes that Chardin envisions us and our world as "engulfed in the layers of God's omnipresence." |
Kate Dobbs Ariail's review of Pictures from the Birth of the World, June 2000, from what was then The Independent.
Andrea Gomez is fearless. No, that's not quite right. She has many fears, which she examines pitilessly, then steps over in her pursuit of knowledge and understanding through painting. The paintings' startling perspectives and Fauvelike brilliance of color might make her seem bolder than she is, and the ambitious nature of her undertaking might seem a mark of hubris. But in reality, Gomez is, with her trained eye and hands, her questing mind and her unusually open heart, just doing the artist's job particularly well.
Still, I had to gulp when I saw the title of her new show of recent paintings at the Horace Williams House. Having been privileged to follow the development of these works from formless ideas through sketches to finished oil paintings, watercolors and drawings, I was already aware that Gomez had based the series on her intent study of the first five verses of the Book of Genesis, along with the Kabbalah and chaos theory. But Pictures from the Birth of the World has a powerful ring to it. Oh boy, I thought. The girl ain't messing around now. This sounds like another whole order of magnitude of seriousness beyond the large figurative drawings of the Burdens series, and even beyond the earlier Ishmael in the Wilderness installation, in which Gomez and collaborating artist Mickey Gault examined the stories of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael in paintings, drawings and sculptures.
And it is. This is as serious as you can get. Imagining not-life, before-life, is not quite the same as imagining death, which is hard enough. Gomez imaginatively sent herself on a journey, not to the end--not into the jaws of death or across the River Styx--but to the beginning of time, and the pictures she brought back are full of reverence, awe and passion. They speak more clearly than words of the astonishing miracle of living. This miracle is vastly old, yet daily it occurs again. Eyes open, and light separates from darkness. Form emerges from chaos in living color, shimmering delicate color, blazing saturated color. Without light, there is no color; without light there is no life, and it is life itself that concerns Gomez.
"You know, I've tried to get interested in the Apocalypse, but it's creation that I love," she says. Unless they are merely assemblers, what artists do is create -- make something from nothing, bring form out of the void -- and consequently many artists have dealt more or less explicitly with the idea or theme of creation. For some, it is a way to honor God or religion; for others, it is a way to honor themselves as godlike. For still others, like Gomez, painting about the creation of the world becomes an ecstatic act. "I don't see religiosity in my work," she says. "It is a mistake to confuse source imagery with faith ... I think that all my work is about humanity, about how wonderful it is to be human in this world."
Before Gomez returned to painting and drawing in the late 1980s, she worked for many years as an experimental filmmaker and animator, and she has never abandoned her interest in non-verbal, temporal narrative ("I'm not talking about illustration here!"). That is not always evident in individual paintings, but has been clear in every series of work she's done, whether figurative or landscape. Her intention to visually manifest her ethical and spiritual values, along with her aesthetic ones, has been equally clear, but rarely has Gomez succeeded so well as in Pictures from the Birth of the World. Conceptually, technically and formally, this is the most powerful body of work she has yet produced.
Andrea Gomez turned 50 last week, and in her sixth decade she is working with tremendous strength, assurance and directness, balancing representation and abstraction, drawing and painting, line and color, with the deftness of maturity. Yet in the very directness of these paintings, in the intensity of their feeling for life, one senses the artist's acute knowledge of mortality, the awareness that her own temporal narrative will end. There's no time to waste, these paintings remind us. Not one tender morning, or bright afternoon, or flaming evening or velvet night. For all too soon, time will be over and light will not separate from the darkness again.
But meanwhile, there is cadmium orange ("the color of sex"), chrome yellow, viridian, alizarin, ultramarine, and there is the daily miracle of creation.
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