TULA TELFAIR:
Six Including This One presents six long, narrow landscape paintings framed separately and mounted vertically, with space between them, on the gallery wall. At first I thought these panoramic views of land and sky might be different fragments of a continuous landscape: a body of water in the third appears to continue in the fourth. But the red rocks at the edge of the third become dark foliage in the fourth. And in some, the vegetation and topography are different enough to suggest completely different locations.
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Brighter areas–a patch of blue sky, light on water–appear to glow from within, the result, Telfair says, of layers of glaze. Darker areas appear as near voids: they seem to gather and absorb any surrounding light. The result is somewhat abstract, self-contained landscapes whose soft focus and variable light suggest intense but disconnected memories–landscape fragments recalled from a long-ago train trip or from a dream. And in fact none of these six, nor any of the other landscape images in the show, was painted from nature; all were created in the studio, “from recollections of moments spent in landscape,” Telfair says. The viewer is never firmly anchored in an actual place–he’s led into a world of mental images infinite in number and equal in legitimacy.
Telfair’s ambivalence about the “reality” of actual landscapes may have its roots in her unusual childhood. She moved with her parents while still a baby to Gabon in West Africa, where they lived until she was seven. Gabon is not exactly on the main tourist route, and she remembers family dinners with a host of eccentric characters. She was also exposed to a variety of local religions. Perhaps most important, she traveled a lot–her father was a mining prospector for the Gabonese government. “Home is where you hang your hat” was a family motto. But she also remembers returning to places and noticing how changed they were: “The countries we were in . . . were in political turmoil. . . . Things were never what you thought they were before . . . there was always a sensation of the rug being pulled out from under you.”
