Art Review: "The dramatic range of what paint can do on display at two Portland galleries"
BY JORGE ARANGO, PORTLAND PRESS HERALD
In her artist’s statement, Thomaston painter Kathleen Florance quotes Danish novelist Thorkild Hansen: “Between chance and fate speaks the human tongue.” The space between these inevitabilities, she believes, is where the artist has “the opportunity to act, and therein lies our hope.”
In fact, a series of paintings – “Gossamer Threads” – in this exhibition inhabits a kind of “in-between” space all its own. To one side are Florance’s extraordinary large-scale charcoal and litho crayon drawings depicting actual forms in nature: a butterfly, a bee, wasps’ nests, a Queen Anne’s lace plant in winter. They are extraordinary in the sense of being not only exquisitely detailed, but in their size.
