August 1, 2017
Melissa B. Rooney
My son and I popped out of the rain in downtown Durham, NC, today and into the iconic Durham Arts Council (DAC) Building, circa 1906. I couldn’t have planned a better field trip.
We saw works by Margie Stewart, MyLoan Dinh, and Chieko Murasugi, all in the space of a large residence and surrounded by windows overlooking the 150-years-old city.
.
Our favorites among the art exhibited, free of charge, were the mixed-media paintings in Nora Phillips’ Threading Colors exhibit. My 7-year-old and I don’t typically visit exhibits that don’t encourage touching, so neither of us had heard of Nora Phillips before. Staring at each painting was like looking into the pool at the base of a stalactite in a magical cave, each one more mesmerizing than the next. We delighted in imaging out loud the images within the uniquely liquid curves and colors that danced before our eyes.
.
Blue Samarai I and II were my son’s favorites. He could see the weary warrior within the black and blue figures that organically filled each canvas.
.
I preferred the Verde Limon/Limon Verde duo. The vine-like green and yellow designs quilted into each canvas evoked photosynthetic single-cell organisms or maybe even the origins of life, itself.
In the Beginning, my favorite of Nora’s mixed-media paintings, could easily be a third in the Limon Verde series and seemed to confirm my interpretation of the previous two. I love the mixture of life’s beginnings that comes to mind when I look at this piece. Is that a growing pea within its shell, barely hanging onto its long and twisting vine? Or is it an embryo in utero, perhaps separating into twins, from which a long green umbilical cord extends on either side? Either way, the feeling of life’s creation is unavoidable.
.
Back home, I looked up Nora Phillips on the Internet and was surprised to see that her work wasn’t all magic cave puddles. Nora’s vibrant and colorful Cityscapes and tree-filled Landscapes were just as magical as the abstract, multimedia works presently exhibited at the DAC. I immediately longed to see Nora’s images in a hard-back children’s picture book on a shelf in my local library.
.
Whether fabric or wood, by weaving the material she is working with into the significance of each image, Nora remains true to her Argentinian ancestry as well as her vision of “art as a medium for channeling emotions or communicating ideas”. Her images generally incorporate vibrant colors, so that they remain thought provoking without becoming depressing. The resulting positivity induces you to gaze longer and makes you feel more light-hearted when you depart.
Comments