Land scape
Gail Factor
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
abstraction, as images emerge, the past often makes an unwitting appearance. What is the role of memory in her work? We are particularly interested in how she considered memory and its evocative role in showing an alternative way to escape and overcome the current reality.
Her work always mirrored her current feelings and the actual topography where she resided. At times, fragments from the past were woven in, some old matters or snippets of memories still in her psyche and affecting her present state. For years after her divorce in the 1990’ s, you see imagery of broken cups and saucers, bleeding women, and floating sheep.( Sheep have always been abundant figures, used throughout her entire body of work. She loved sheep. They symbolized warm feelings and affiliation, based on time spent long ago in the English countryside with friends). Some images seem thematically depleted with time, though then there is the surprise of the occasional recurrence, surfacing as some unresolved kink. The unusual technique of Tone Poem, which consists of Continuo and Allegro( below), is the consistent use of a new perspective, which indicates looking down from above. These were part of her very last body of work, created at a time before she was consciously aware that she was ill, but her subconscious was dictating to her, offering up segments, remnants and morsels from her entire life. I see these as aerial maps of her past, a reflection on a life in toto. And these environments seem to include not only her residence at the time in Tesuque, but to all places she inhabited. It is truly a series of the most abstract storytelling and imagery she had created.
Ms. Factor ' s abstract paintings are marked out with recurrent reminders to nature and to the notion of landscape: did she see a definite relationship between nature and her work?
Nature has always been the prominent foundation of her work, specifically mountainous locations. She had a deep connection to mountains, and after she first began living in the windy steep Laurel Canyon neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills in California in the 1960’ s, she felt she could no longer live anywhere flat. It was her