LINDA JACOBSON, Review

Artweek, Stephanie Sanchez, Artist and writer

Linda Jacobson’s chalk drawings on view at Bolen Gallery, in Santa Monica, describe mutability and suggest the process of transcendence in the context of landscape. Most of the drawings were done out of doors and were inspired by a visit she made to the Camargue area of southern France, near Arles, which attracted artists such as Van Gogh and Cezanne.

Jacobson shares the interests of the impressionists –color is broken up prismatically, almost dealt with for its own sake, and the landscape is treated as a living, breathing force, energized with swirling strokes of color. Influences of the surrealists and, to some extent, the synchronists can also be seen. In the most memorable drawings she subordinates landscape as subject matter to the more abstract qualities of light, color and form existing within the landscape. In Les Rougeoux (the reeds) a natural form in the field, are abstracted into broad strokes of color that dominate the drawing, primarily as physical elements on the paper, secondarily as representations of growing plants. In another drawing, in slashes of gray and black, the landscape from which the rendering evolved is barely decipherable. Rather, the dominant theme is the motion and turbulence of air or water – it is not certain which was intended. But the atmosphere, the air itself, is the actual theme, the spirit if you will.

In all of Jacobson’s drawings a sense of spinning, reeling and flowing conveys an overall impression of joyousness and celebration, not in a facile manner. A refreshing sensibility effectively expressed.