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If Susan Dory's pulses of paint were translated into sound, they'd hum. Her paintings are slow, insistent harmonies that swell into ragged chorus lines. As each delicate oblong creeps horizontally across the space of her canvases, it sings against the oblongs around it, all stationary but imbued with the illusion of motion.
Another way to think about Dory's paintings is as markers of time. Each paint pulse is a tick of the clock. Completely flat against the surface, her creamy acrylic abstractions suggest depths, time measured and time lost to measuring, deep in the distance.
Her exhibit at Winston Wachter Fine Art is titled "Sequence Bias," which suggests a third way to consider her work: As a subverter of order.
Dory constructs grids that refuse to hold their place in space. From the thick and short colored intervals of "Burgeoning Snap" (32 inches high by 36 inches wide) to the elastic stretch of "Drenches Traces" (48 inches high by 60 inches wide), there's a sense of intervals refusing to complete their appointed rounds. They start when they want and stop when they please, inflecting the grid with personality.
No machine made them. They're marks from a hand that keeps its own time and sets its own rhythm, and they're an idle hum to keep the dark away, slippery with facts but rich in atmospherics.
Like Ann Gardner, who recently exhibited there, Dory is a step up for Winston Wachter Fine Art. Since opening in Seattle in the late 1990s, Winston Wachter has specialized in handsome vacuity. Although handsome, neither Gardner nor Dory's work is vacant.
Brian Murphy, also exhibiting this month at Winston Wachter, is an even greater step up. He's a beautiful painter, but his content is a time bomb ticking amid his lushly vaporous effects. He'd be as welcome in a high-priced, low-art values home as a rat in the pantry.
Murphy paints himself. Images of his flesh floating in watercolor on paper are massive volumes with no weight. He presents himself as large and leaky, the brown of his beard draining into the sand-pink cloud of his sagging belly and below. His torso dwarfs his head, and his eyes, when visible, are clear, alert and verging on confrontational.
Art began with fat people, the Venus of Willendorf carved in limestone 24,000 years B.C. as a probable homage to fertility. Among painters, Rubens stands out, which is where the complimentary adjective, Rubenesque, came from, although it doesn't apply to men. Fat women were voluptuous and fat men were funny in a Falstaffian vein.
In contemporary art, most prominently, there's Lucien Freud painting corpulence in both men and women; Jenny Saville, painting women only, and Catherine Opie, photographing herself. Unlike Murphy, the three others give weight to their volumes.
Only for Murphy does flesh float. He's a tempest of his own making, creating weather states as self-portraits. Because you can see through them, they're apparitional, an insubstantial pageant ready to melt into colored air. As Prospero famously concludes in "The Tempest," "We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on; and our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep."
Painting himself as spirit dogged by flesh enables him to explore not just the container his consciousness comes in but the existential subject of inescapable suffering. Life is a deforming experience, but there are consolations, the grace Murphy brings to the ungainly experience of being alive.
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