The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Rebecca Purdum at Pamela Salisbury
2022.11.15
For
my first official blog post at Entropvisions I'm writing about the
paintings of Rebecca Purdum hanging at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in
Hudson, NY, through Nov. 27. With obvious nods to Resnick and Rothko,
Purdum's paintings are also quiet and meditative, but actually quite
different from the AbEx artists'. Resnick and Rothko create large
-scale worlds of cosmic space grown from completely abstract inner
beginnings, while Purdum's smaller easel-scaled work creates intimate
reflections on what appears as actual landscape locations. In the press
release, Purdum begins with poet John Keats who wrote of the three
forms of ethereal: real, semi-real and nothings. Purdum's paintings
hover between the real and semi-real, with suggestions of light and
notes of color emerging from the atmosphere of memory, a visual
reenactment of the felt experience of place. Their almost wax-like
surfaces push these memories just a bit further into the intangible,
while also giving an overall elegance to the oeuvre, making it virtually
impossible to do justice to the work via photographs. This show
definitely is worth a visit - and you'll find other well-worth viewing
shows at the gallery as well - shows which I'll review soon.