ELIZABETH COYNE: INTO THE SPACES WE BREATHE
This juxtaposition of masklike faces and patterns suggests that Coyne’s central subject is the way one’s experience–of nature, of thoughts, of dreams–affects, even determines, the self. The faces, often with little more than slits for eyes and a few curved lines for the mouth, serve as metaphoric mirrors that reflect their surroundings.
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I was moved by the wonderfully complex relationships–contrasts, tensions, but also connections–between the clearly delineated visages and the more varied, lyrically beautiful surrounds. In almost all of these works Coyne avoids predictable, static designs, and her use of marks that vary in color and shape creates fields that seem mobile, almost alive. In her world very little can be pinned down; “reality” is not reducible to concrete things or words; dream, nature, speech, and daydream are never far apart.
In this work, as in nine others, the abstract marks continue out of the picture onto the wooden frame. This is not the first time this has been done. There are, for example, Russian icon paintings in which church steeples bleed into the frame, though this use of the frame seems little more than a mannerist quirk with no special significance. The traditional function of a frame is to lead the eye into the painting while also delineating it in space. But Coyne’s rough frames, hardly ideal surfaces for images, seem like artifacts of nature, and the patterns of these works, by continuing from human-made canvas to natural wood, become an all-inclusive world.
Coyne, born in 1959 in Duluth, Minnesota, grew up in Crown Point, Indiana. She did her undergraduate work at Purdue, has an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and recently moved to Niles, Michigan. She recalls feeling as a child that things had spirits–not only animals and plants, but ordinary household objects. When she was seven the family sold a refrigerator they’d had for a long time. “I cried because I thought it had a spirit,” she says. She did Norman Rockwell-style paintings in her teens, then was exposed in college to painters like Pollock and Rothko and saw the possibilities for expressing her deeper feelings in art. Perhaps the animism of her childhood perceptions informs the interpenetrations of her current work, in which an abstract mark can have as much significance as a human figure, or more.
