Essay by Deborah McLeod on
Surface Tension:Paintings and Installation by Charlotte Robinson

Water has its private ways. What water's poetic surface reveals to the surveying eye is just a small part of its large, complex metaphor for life. Charlotte Robinson's paintings help us to reflect on the necessary meaning and predicament of water, and in doing so, to perhaps consider also that water is a daily baptism of our body and soul, whether we sip it, sup from it, bathe in it, or pass by it, visually drinking in its graces.

Stylistically, Robinson's animated, patterned scores of repeating energy, roiling in translucent scrims of robust cobalts, compromised ultramarines and ailing Payne's Gray express the water itself as a living, struggling realm, claiming its own interests in a larger context. While in the sky above, her painted air moves in delicate striations as though the marks are ghosted recollections of windblown pine boughs and struggling bird wings having left permanent whispered scars in the air. Charlotte Robinson's manner of applying paint to create a sensory environment is not unlike a Vivaldi composition when she is rendering her sunlit areas, with Philip Glass ruminating obsessively in the shade and shadow.

Beyond that delicious sort of material delight, Robinson expresses water's larger environmental concern metaphorically as a predicative relationsip, either vertically or horizontally in paneled diptychs and planar triptychs. She often binds her subject's contained sphere to its influencing, more expansive atmosphere, or she contrasts its overt trusting surface with subaqueous disturbances and defilements. Thus these paintings often become secretly cautionary works.

Robinson's art summons up some historical formal practices that associate both with transience and transcendence. These inclinations may be interpreted as touching upon the temporal and meditative landscapes in Japanese screens and scrolls (but here with the traditional sense of distance exchanged for intimacy.) Or in addition to suggesting stratification, they may somewhat recall the layered pictorial narrations of Hindu paintings (except in this instance they are rather like cross-sections indicating the infamous conquests and revelations of time).

Other paintings, such as "Sky and Rapids" appear to hold more of a Genesis promise within them. The cloud in the left panel of this work almost looks like an infant in swaddling clothes hovering in the sky above, while its nexus is a clear mountain stream. But even as a mere benevolent cloud, Nature's resurrection of possibility continues in the miraculously forgiving physics of our planet.
Charlotte Robinson does not assume an evangelical position on behalf of her subject, nevertheless her gorgeous painterly scenes assist a devoted artistic mission to bear witness through her art to the beautiful vulnerability of the absolute source of our existence. Her paintings are visual epistles, water's own lessons on giving and taking, leaving and bringing, in much the same tradition and spirit that water may intend us, its evolved children, to continue.

Deborah McLeod, Curator and Director of Exhibitions