Art review: Cove Street ‘Retrospective’ Covers Jon Imber’s Range

BY Jorge Arango, Portland Press Herald

Jon Imber, Two Pines By The Thoroughfare (2002)

They are about paint – its texture and viscosity, its undiluted color and raw sensuality. These works also have an immediacy the earlier figurative works lack. About his plein air painting, Imber said, “I might put a cloud in the painting and then, 10 minutes later, when the cloud is gone, I’ll remove it,” according to a document entitled “Jon Imber in His Own Words.” They emanate the sense of fleeting moments captured.

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Cynthia & John Orcutt, Beech Leaves, Carrabassett Valley, ME

In his seminal book “The Decisive Moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson championed “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” The Orcutts are after something similar, communicating, they write, “the essence of a particular place or structure.” In doing so, the best of their photography also evokes something deeper — the profound stillness and silence of a transient instant. They catch beech leaves in winter as their icy overlay melts, seemingly the instant before slipping to the ground; the melancholic dignity of grain elevators monumentalized by light that will vanish in seconds, leaving them in darkness and obscurity; the shadows cast on snow by clotheslines before dissolving into the night.

Read the rest of the article here: https://www.pressherald.com/2020/09/06/art-review-2/