Reviews: Massachusetts

Linda Behar: Embroideries from Nature
Mobilia Gallery • Cambridge, MA • www.mobilia-gallery.com

Linda Behar, Summer Salt Marsh III—Marshfield, cotton embroidery, 3¾ x 6¾".

In a contemporary art world filled with fiber art valued more for its ideological earnestness than its creativity and craft, it is remarkable to encounter a consummate artist such as Linda Behar who paints and sculpts with only thread and needle.

This small exhibition of photo-realistic scenes of the natural world is dominated by images of salt marshes, a subject matter that lends itself particularly well to the line and texture of a stitch. In these scenes, the spiky energy, density, and complexity of marsh grass contrast with the placid flow of water as it gently carves its way through the land from the sea.  Behar dispenses with horizon lines and panoramic views, focusing her attention on small, classically-composed fragments of marine landscapes small enough to be held in the hand (4 x 6"), but large enough to capture the imagination.

Behar utilizes a color photograph as a matrix, a jumping-off point, for her embroidered marsh-scapes such as Summer Salt Marsh III—Marshfield. Laying down grounds of colored thread, much as a painter prepares a canvas, she painstakingly adds thousands of thread strokes as an overlay, blending colors and overlapping lines to achieve a richness of hue and an energetic surface that no photograph can possibly convey. With the trained eye of a painter, she achieves great depth in her compositions through her sense of perspective and the recession of hues from light to dark as she moves from fore to background. Texture and three-dimensionality is enhanced through the heavy build-up of thread in the exposed embankments of earth that border the flowing water.

In a recent Harvard Magazine article, Behar’s technique of laying down lines and bits of color was compared to that of pointillist and impressionist painters. Her method, however, never intrudes upon our consciousness, never proclaims itself, as was frequently the case in the work of these experimental painters. Instead, her threads of color blend seamlessly together. Like the pointillists and impressionists, however, her real subject matter is light and its subtle, loving modulations of color and shape.

—Raymond Liddell

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