You Stepped out of a Dream,” on view recently at Chelsea’s Pictor Gallery, featured two inventive artists, Linda Dujack and Linda Ganus, who delight in defying the rules. They don’t follow art history conventions and are almost impossible to put in a category. Instead, each of these artists creates her own standards and definitions of what contemporary art can be today.
Their work reminds me of what the French Romantic artist Delacroix wrote in his diary in 1822 that painting bypasses the verbal arts: “It somehow establishes a more direct—but more mysterious link—between sender and receiver.” With these two artists, who are good friends, there is no search for meaning. Their paintings are internal, highly personal interpretations, mysterious and elusive. They invite contemplation, not explanation.
Linda Dujack’s work combines printmaking, found objects, textiles, wool, even wood in her collages and paintings. Among her most evocative images are beds and dresses. “I am inspired by dresses,” she says, adding that they evoke home, family, and young girls’ dreams. As in her many renderings of dresses, there is a romantic tenderness to her mixed-media painting, Annabel Lee. It is inspired by the incredibly romantic poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, with its message that love can transcend death.
Other sources of inspiration for Dujack are the abstract collages of German-American painter Hannelore Baron (1926-1987) and the flat, ink paintings of German artist Julius Bissier (1893-1965). Dujack, like Bissier, works on a small canvas which he called “miniatures.” He called art a form of meditation while for Dujack it is her preferred path to the unconscious.
“My art is for people who live simple lives,” says Dujack. “My dresses symbolize a code of honor. They represent people who are loyal, conscientious, and modest.”
All of Linda Ganus’s paintings in this thought-provoking exhibition are inspired by the artist’s jazz favorites. Although trained as a classical musician, she loves to listen to jazz ballads when she is painting.
Don’t look for energetic brushstrokes and thickly applied oils in her work. Her cloud paintings can be somber or bright, imbued or denied color. She relies on fingers, cloths, spills, oil on canvas, and on occasion brushes to create her dream-like images.
Ganus works in her studio, totally from memory. “I rely on my imagination,” she says. “Listening to jazz helps me to keep my work loose, spontaneous, and uninhibited. I try to capture the fleeting moment when I had an experience of observing a specific cloud formation.”
There are 24 variations of cloud paintings in this exhibition. Each has the pulsating rhythms of a jazz composition. No two are alike yet each captures a mysterious moment when a transformation occurs. They are no longer clouds, but a dreamlike luminous, personal space which the artist is willing to share with us.
Both Ganus and Dujack create universal paintings of how to express a dream. Their interpretations may differ but their goal is the same: to delve deeply into hidden emotions and transform those intimate feelings onto canvas. G&S
“You Stepped Out of a Dream,” Linda Dujack and Linda Ganus at pictorgallery.com
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