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