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Photos Sue Harrison
Selina Trieff in front of her large oil and gold leaf on canvas work titled 'Together Again.'(top)
Robert Henry. (bottom) |
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Trieff and Henry show the power of unity
Sue Harrison
BANNER STAFF
Last Friday's opening at the Berta Walker Gallery for Selina Trieff and Robert Henry was jammed with a cross-section of people from the visual arts, from theater and letters, crowded with folks from Truro, Wellfleet and Provincetown, folks who rarely wind up in the same room at the same time. The unifying factor that brought such a diverse crowd out was the combined show of work by husband and wife artists Henry and Trieff that looked at how they survived and grew from Trieff's devastating hospitalization last March. (The show continues through Aug. 21.)
Walker, they say, wanted them to do the joint show as a kind of completion to what they had been through. 'Berta was so involved with Selina when she was in the hospital, she was there doing her Reiki (energy moving technique) and so glad that Selina came through,' Henry says. 'She sees this as a victory celebration, a victory dance.'
When Trieff went into the hospital for surgery on her neck, neither knew how ill she would become, how close to death she would slip before coming back.
During her weeks in New York's Beth Israel Hospital, Trieff went through periods of total immobility, times of being unable to speak and a long period of rehabilitation where almost everything had to be relearned. What was sometimes the worst for her was her inability to work.
She struggled to recall how to write her own name and then began to do sketches as she recovered. Those drawings are full of powerlessness and rage against the indignity of having one's voice silenced. Many of them are in the show along with a series of oil-on-paper heads based on those drawings. The heads lack some of Trieff's characteristic reserve and allow the viewer to see their vulnerability and pain.
Opposite Trieff's hospital drawings are the sketches Henry did of his wife after her operation. They show her in traction, hooked up to so many machines that she is virtually lost. Others depict her on the vertical table learning how to be upright without falling into vertigo and finally in the long process of physical therapy. Henry has turned those drawings and his recollections into a small intense book called 'Selina in Hospital.'
Both his and her drawings are a radical departure from their usual work.
Her work has been described as haunting, especially her paintings with regal staring figures that peer out at the viewer with cool regard. There is a restrained but iconic sense to her figures, most of which bear a more than passing resemblance to their creator. Her colors are rich, deep and accented with the use of gold leaf; her lines bold and sure.
Henry's work often appears more playful but can be equally haunting in the inexplicable images that beg the question, what's going on here? For instance, his painting 'Swimmingly,' in which a man is swimming through the ocean except the man is actually swimming in water that is inside a boat that is nearly full of water as it sits in the middle of the sea. Like much of his work that evolved from earlier drawings or paintings, the swimmer appeared last year in a painting as a man lying on his back in a boat that was filling with water and in danger of being swamped by the waves building around it. 'Part of the interest is the implied absurdity,' he says of the man swimming away inside a boat. For him, all paintings begin as an image devoid of explicit meaning.
'I've always felt that the images are akin to dream images,' he says. 'People ask if I do my paintings from dreams. Painting, drawing, they are related to the process of dreaming. ... Images may not make sense from one image to another but there is a spatial logic to them.'
In the current show Henry shows hazy, inviting landscapes and interiors of rooms and other odd dreamish paintings, such as 'Lunatics' which shows a group cavorting on a moonlit lawn, dancing and doing headstands while a storm builds off to the side. Also included is Henry's 'Voyeurs,' a large canvas in which a crowd of people stand outside of a well-lighted house at night staring into the windows.
Trieff is also showing a number of larger canvases including one titled 'Together Again' with two life-size figures standing with a dancer's grace.
When asked who is together again she replies, 'I'm together again. We're together again. ... I spent a long time feeling not really there.'
'Time when I'm not working, when I'm not in my studio, I don't feel quite real,' Trieff says. 'My sense of grounding, I don't have it unless I can work.'
'I feel a hell of a lot better than last year but there's a carryover, a psychic pain, a fragility, ' she says. 'It has made me eager to enjoy now, right now. The past is gone and who the hell knows what will happen next.'
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Aug 17th, 2000