Literature

ANNE HEBEBRAND
by Lois Tarlow, 2007

When I first encountered Anne Hebebrand's work, it was a complexity of shapes, patterns, and colors, an exuberant cacophony. In the ensuing years, she has dampened the volume but not the zeal. By editing and distilling, by layering and excavating, her work emits a resonating, engaging hum. It suggests the musing that created it, and offers to the patient viewer moments of meditation and discovery.

Indeed, discovery and invention predominate in the next series, some of which, Celestial Rain, Diagram, and Taking It in Stride are included in this exhibition. These pieces perch on a fulcrum which balances abstraction and objectivity. The format is an overall design in colors and marks that acknowledge landscape. In fact, all of her work explores the connection between herself and the natural world.

In this affinity, intuition provides a reliable path. It is an important player in her creative process. Hebebrand talks about the day she put a horizontal stroke, like a veritable horizon line, across her painting. To her seeming surprise, she decided to go with it. (These days, that's a daring move.) The result is a departure, a sort of sidebar of landscapes ranging from somewhat abstract, as Fading Light, to moody, mysterious inner scapes, as in the smaller Choppy Seas and Night Solitude. The strength of these landscape sketches, as she calls them, lies in the interplay of an atmospheric space with a graphic area of pure invention.

Hebebrand's most recent work has come full circle but with a new confidence in conception and execution. In these latest abstractions, blue predominates. She writes, "For me, blue is a color of indefinite depth carrying spiritual meaning that can be uplifting as well as despairing." It is also seductive as in Blue Sheath and Blue Sound.

Another alluring aspect of these works is the revelation of the journey taken in the course of their creation. Working on canvas or gessoed paper with acrylic and oil paint, sometimes toned with graphite powder, Hebebrand scrapes through the layers with humble tools from the hardware store. In so doing, she provides us with the intriguing opportunity to detect the activity of the hand and her choices of the underlayers, overlayers, scrapings, and reapplications.

The real significance of her latest work, however, lies in the fact that it goes beyond the physical recognition of nature, beyond the earthly space to the spirit within.

Lois Tarlow is a painter, writer and teacher. She was Profile editor of Art New England from 1979 to 2004.