Art: Up Close and Personal--The People of Las Vegas

Life lessons

By F. Andrew Taylor

I waited a week before even trying to put my feelings about this show on paper, thinking the time would allow me to step back from my initial, visceral reaction to the work. I had assumed that academic aloofness, which pervades most reviews, would override the emotional reaction. Alas, this was not the case for this show. What follows is less a detached appraisal than it is a mash note.

To say I was struck by Diane Eugster's show is a gross understatement. The truth is, I was floored, transported and outright flabbergasted. I had frankly forgotten that art could do that to me, that the judgmental, reasoning mind, continuously psychoanalyzing and dissecting artwork, could be hushed into silence by bold, moving art.

Of late, I've been more concerned with meaning and theme than technique. While I certainly still recognized well-crafted work and interesting styles, they had taken a back seat to my examination of what the painting was about as opposed to what the painting was. Eugster's work is so powerful that I was temporarily shaken from my complacent world view.

Eugster teaches at the Las Vegas Art Museum and it was at a group show of its instructors that I saw her work previously. Her work there consisted of a few beautiful landscapes, which I enjoyed, but it did not dumbfound as this show does. The work is not groundbreaking by any means. They are simply figure paintings, but figure paintings in bold, brash strokes. The brushwork is decisive and captivating. Eugster prefers to refer to these pieces as figure studies rather than portraits. I assume this means she is less concerned with likeness than the play of light and color. Nonetheless, there is a quiet dignity in the figures. They evoke strong personality and noble mien. There is power in these figures in quiet repose, a dynamism even as they simply sit there. I had seen a few of her paintings before and was struck by her masterful control of light, but these figures are the idiom in which she shines brightest.

The colors are both intense and subtle. She seems to effortlessly pull off the trick of mixing brilliant lights and subtly hued darks without creating a discordant separation between the two. They work in a stupefying harmony, an exquisite ballet of yin and yang. Likewise, the effect on my artist's soul was a study in seeming contradiction. I was at once shamed and awed that my own work paled in comparison, while at the same time I was lifted and moved to think that art, perhaps even eventually my art, could reach such heights.