2003 Baltimore Sun Review

Roots Of Change 20×26″ mixed media
Taylor’s images defined by ‘pure line and color’

Arts
Reference to Pollock and others is apparent

By Glenn McNatt
Sun Art Critic
September 25, 2003
Many shows this month have tilted heavily toward the abstract, so Maxine Taylor’s exhibition of non-objective, mixed-media works on paper at the Montage Gallery of Federal Hill fits right in with the seasonal trend.
Taylor’s images, which she draws or paints on large sheets of watercolor paper, are obviously indebted to the abstract-expressionist artists of the 1950s and 1960s such as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler as well as to earlier modernists, like the Russian expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, who insisted that non-representational art reflects the values of a higher spiritual dimension. Kandinsky elaborated his ideas in an influential book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he suggested that “color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings.
The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.”
Despite the venerable tradition of non-objective painting, Taylor only recently adopted the style, so this show represents a breakthrough of sorts for her. A few of the works have recognizable figures or landscape features, but for the most part she speaks in a visual language of pure line and color.
In her best compositions, there is a controlled energy and a finely balanced tension between movement and stability in her irregular shapes and layered colors. The pictures hold together because of a kind of centripetal force that pulls your eye up and across the main structural elements. (For some reason, this kind of reading seems to work best starting from the bottom right-hand corner of the picture – just the opposite of the way we scan a page of text in a book.)
Taylor’s pictures don’t really look like Kandinsky and Frankenthaler, but the fact that so many of them work anyway shows that whatever lessons she picked up from the older masters were indeed well-learned. One leaves this show looking forward to seeing what the next evolution of this intriguing artist will bring.
The gallery is at 925 S. Charles St. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 410-725-1125.

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun