The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Mary Flinn at Equity Gallery
2024.4.20
A visit to Mary Flinn’s exhibition, on view at Equity Gallery through May 4, is a visit to a magical world of adult fairies and ethereally unnameable stories of grace, love and generosity. Immersed in the glowing color of the gods, nymph-like figures, sometimes of substance but often ephemeral, live in a state of becoming, suggestions of the tiny miracles of nature that hide between the blades of grass below our feet or the leaves above. With subtle references to classical archetypes, Mary blends the ancient spiritual traditions of Hinduism, Middle-Eastern mythologies, and early Christianity with her own contemporary responses to an inner life to create glorious paintings of the rhythms of nature, and the colors of dreams. Even the painting frames partake in this cultural symbolism and flow of light, as some frames are made with an embossing technique modeled after the Indian Mysore style of painting, a technique that involves creating raised buttons out of a gesso-type paste and then coating the surfaces with gold leaf. With other paintings, wooden frames, such as those around the triptychs, both separate and unify the panels, much as Christian altar supports do. But not only do the frames make these oil paintings multi-media, as glitter and delicate lace are sometimes embedded in their surfaces, enhancing the already shimmering color that is part of their undulation of air, light, being and non-being. These are instinctively-made paintings, where allusive forms seem to emerge from the unconscious connection to another world, a world more real than reality, a world of the creative passions of the imagination.