Art: Moving Pictures by Susan Forestieri

Behind the scenes: Moving Pictures deftly captures life's quiet, candid moments

By Erika Yowell

Susan Forestieri's paintings, currently on view at the Charleston Heights Art Center in a one-woman show titled Moving Pictures, are the delightful descendants of both Degas' genre paintings and Sargent's sometimes jarringly intimate portraits of British aristocracy and early America's leisure class. Her incorporation of spare interior compositions and harsh white light also manages to invoke the spirit of Edward Hopper.

Forestieri provides candid glimpses into the backstage preparations of performers in several small-scale oil paintings on masonite and paper, which call to mind Degas' famous depictions of ballet dancers donning their tutus and lacing up their toe shoes. The application of oils on these two substances offers up a different effect than it does on canvas, its more typical substrate; the diminished porosity of masonite and, to an even greater extent, paper, gives a glossiness to these miniatures that holds the eye's attention longer than it otherwise might.

Forestieri works on canvas, too, as in the large double portrait "Amy and Shawn," featuring a seated girl dressed in white (whose attire and long brunette hair combine to recall Sargent's portrait of a similar subject) being addressed by a standing woman dressed in an evening gown. Neither figure confronts the viewer; rather, both seem to be caught in unself-conscious conversation. Interestingly, the background in the painting--a solitary chair and some draping--implies an artist's studio, as does the frou-frou dress of the sitters, but the scene suggests Forestieri found its informality more inspiring than the carefully composed arrangement she had planned. Such an interpretation is speculative, of course, but adds to the charming, behind-the-scenes spontaneity that permeates her work.

On the postcard promoting the exhibit is its title work, which features the aforementioned Hopperesque interior and associated squint-inducing light, reminiscent, say, of a June midmorning. The room in "Moving Pictures" houses a sectional sofa, which provides a strong, hard-edged horizontal in the foreground, and a painting-within-a-painting of two geishas who appear to be returning any observer's gaze. The room's only other occupant is a woman seated on the sofa at the far left of the image, rather garishly illuminated by the light coming in through an unseen window. She, too, appears to be watching us watching her. The reciprocal voyeurism of the quiet little scene lends it a dynamic quality befitting its title.

Invoking photographer Cindy Sherman's movie stills is also tempting when confronting Forestieri's work. As implied by the exhibit's title, her paintings seem intended to be read as depicting mere snippets of time--not the momentous events themselves but the unassuming moments between them.