by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for New American Paintings
Rebecca Bird’s painting show “Niagara Falls” at Kopeikin Gallery is compelling and beautiful. The show features a mix of delicate watercolors on paper and equally fragile acrylics and oils on wood. Something about the balance between the very subtle nature of her works combined with the hard, angular movements within her details compelled me to contemplate and wonder.
One room features a series of four paintings on wood which take on the cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. These paintings serve as an interesting counterpoint to the watercolors in the front room because unlike the blank canvas the paper provides her watercolors, the wood grain provides Bird with a predetermined mine of wood-grain curvatures and movement to explore, mimic, and accentuate with her paint.
Bird explains, “I’m fascinated by images of violent motion stopped, as in photographs of explosions. In these images the unstoppable force of the falls was frozen twice, once by the temperature and once by the camera.” But besides photographic images halting time quite physically in a snapshot, Bird equally captures time by accentuating the wood grain with her paint, emphasizing the passage of time through the very cross-section and growth of the trees on which she paints.
Read the rest here at New American Paintings.