GALLERIES
Painter uses technology to great effect
By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent | April 30, 2004
Catlin Rockman's paintings are so purely and obsessively about painting you
could get lost in the intricacies, the lush details, and the undulating fields.
But then you might lose sight of the pulpy subject matter: Rockman paints
buxom, brawny, scantily clad female action figures. She blends her charged,
lowbrow content with highbrow technical prowess, in the vein of Lisa Yuskavage
and John Currin. Rockman's a young Boston artist, but with this kind of work,
up now at Green Street Gallery, she could be poised to make it big.
Unlike Yuskavage and Currin, who beautifully use traditional figure painting
techniques to portray tawdry and disturbing scenes, Rockman uses her craft
to address the visual world today, appropriating computer effects with her
paintbrush. She photographs the figurines, scans the pictures, and applies
Photoshop effects named after painting processes, such as "palette knife."
Then she projects her image on a large scale and paints it in several coats
with excruciating precision, defining some areas down to the pixel, by hand
and without the steadying aid of tape. A single painting might take a year
to make.
The result dazzles. I did not at first recognize the figure in "Power
No. 3." Up close, you get drawn into tiny increments of the painting:
one orb of tawny tones looks like a Tuscan landscape; many areas show jagged
gradations of color, the way a low-resolution photo appears on a computer
screen. In addition to the pixels, Rockman airbrushes portions of the canvas
to achieve a glowing, haloed, digital look. Here, an airbrushed island of
lavender ringed with peach pops out of the center of the picture, soft and
velvety beside the jagged pixels. It's deep space that also rises to meet
us.
I had to look around the corner at a small-scale image Rockman dashed off
of this superhero. When I returned to the larger canvas she jumped out at
me like the She-Hulk who appears in another of Rockman's paintings. This one
was wearing leering skulls as a brassiere (one cup was the Tuscan landscape)
and blue buglike pincers on her mask. With the figure's super-sexualized body
and impossibly broad shoulders, or the doe eyes of the figure in another painting,
Rockman points up the frightening and funny contemporary iconography of the
ideal woman in today's culture. She does it while appropriating the whiz-bang
visions of the digital age to the slower, more considered world of painting,
making work that zings like eye candy, but offers much more to chew on.
Contact: jameshull@jameshull.com or jameshull@earthlink.net