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Diane Churchill's swans and Ledas are a severe and radiant series
of watercolors and acrylics. Each one is different and new and
haunting. Churchill has learned a saturation from the fauves that
does not contradict her own freshness. Her Ledas are never violated;
they do not shrink from an extreme transformation. How much the
painter has learned from Yeats, from Rilke, and from an
untranslatable intrepidity of the heart.
Her red is not just passionate but visceral, and her twin-tailed
glyph-filled paintings are as strange and frangible as the maximal
Indian tantric meditations. There is a devotion to a dream of art in
these committed narratives. Though they are symbolist, there is no
retreat from the optical: they must be scrutinized in detail.
An art historian once joked that the Renaissance was lucky to have
Greek mythology, for sexuality and strangeness, as if the Bible
weren't already filled with angels, sensuality, and intercourse
between opposites. "The world is a wedding," not a violation. The
meeting here, as the artist has said, is of other dimensions, and I
think it is difficult to decide in the Paradise of blood and
thresholds, who is getting the most pleasure: the artist, the swan,
Leda or ourselves? Excess is our necessity. Inflecting Breton, we
might say beauty will be uncontrollable (like this) or will not be.
David Shapiro
Poet and Art Critic
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