The works in the Linda Tavernise Retrospective, produced in Greensboro for the most part between 1978 and 2007, comprise a remarkable achievement. The ensemble of more than one hundred works includes major paintings on panel, canvas and paper and smaller commissioned works. Examples of Tavernise’s paintings of interiors, landscapes, portraits, seascapes, and animals are brought together for this survey. Linda Tavernise is an artist who avows her connection to the stylistic traditions of the past. One of the pleasures offered by the present retrospective is following her “working through” the pantheon of painters she sought to learn from. The extraordinary energy she applied to this project resulted in a personal vision that is rich in resonances as well as formal invention.

Several recent exhibitions (including Hand to Hand curated at Green Hill by Rebecca Fagg) have associated Linda Tavernise with the “Greensboro School” of artists who graduated from UNC-G’s studio art program headed by Andrew Martin and Peter Agostini in the 1970s and 80s. Tavernise has stated that though she learned a great deal from Martin (including “the essential drawing” of the human figure) it is the great nineteenth and early twentieth century masters of color whom she emulated. The titles of several paintings from different periods reveal Tavernise’s ongoing dialog with the Nabis and Post-Impressionists, Waiting for Matisse (1994) and Van Gogh Wave (1986) among them. Pierre Bonnard, whom she discovered while studying in California at Claremont Graduate School before coming to Greensboro, would remain a primary influence throughout her career. Bonnard’s painting would deeply mark her own approach:“The major change in my painting was when I discovered Pierre Bonnard. His work drew me in, the way he used colors. It was definitely a reaction to the science of color, how warm and cool react to each other. You can make something glow by using two colors. From that time on, I was tied to Bonnard, his bath house scenes were eloquent.”¹

This influence is evident in the group of interior scenes that comprised Tavernise’s 1985 MFA exhibition. Interior Space (1985) is a view through two doorways into a bathroom with an open window. Tavernise’s close study of Bonnard may be seen in Self Portrait, 1985 the sensuous application of paint and use of vibrant associations of complimentary and opposing colors. The skewed angle of the blue doorway is the first in a succession of flattened planes which lead our eye inward to the plum colored hallway floor, yellow bathroom door frame, deep green shower curtain and finally the window’s white square. This progression is countered by a return movement of light coming in from the window -- projecting a rectangle on the shower curtain, leaving a lavender patch on the hallway floor, and brushing the door with blue light. The unassuming rooms in the small house on Jefferson Street evoke alternating melancholy and quietude, and the sensation we have entered, what Paul Valéry in his essay on painting called “regions of the mind and being.”² In Chaco Canyon Doorway (1996), the artist revisited these same registers.

Tavernise has stated that it was difficult for her to move forward after the success of this early body of work. One would not guess from a self-portrait from the same period Self Portrait (1985), in which standing erect in a white smock beside her easel, the artist gazes confidently out at the viewer. Tavernise continued to experiment with color theory in works such as Romance of Three (c. 1986) in which the three golden fruit appear as isolated spheres on the table top’s cool platform, and the mauve shadows they cast on the surface are painted with the same intensity as the fruit themselves. During this time she also introduces the device of bands of arbitrary color used to frame the picture plane and divide it into different views or sections.

Another work from this period, Van Gogh Wave (1986) received an award of merit from Barbara Haskell when exhibited that same year at the Durham Art Guild. Tavernise would produce wave paintings throughout her career and the exhibition contains several striking examples such as the nearly abstract Blue Wave (c. 2002). Van Gogh Wave presents an expanse of sunlit ocean with waves rushing up to the shore’s edge extending across the bottom edge of the picture plane. Paraphrasing Van Gogh’s painterly “short hand,” Tavernise utilizes individuated brush strokes and a thicker application of paint to register the force of the unfurling ocean. The variations in tone and use of complimentary colors convey an ebullient emotional state. Van Gogh describes his style in his letters as “not the tame or conventional language derived from a studied manner or a system rather than from nature itself…”³ Tavernise was seeking a more direct connection to nature in her own work, and a visit to the zoo in Asheboro opened the gate to a new theme that would allow her to fully explore the expressive potential of color.

Tavernise’s many paintings of residents of the North Carolina Zoo were exhibited regularly at the Somerhill Gallery during the 1990s and are some of the artist’s best-known works. She has stated that the zoo paintings were a “pure celebration.” They embody one of those rare contexts where an artist’s empathy for her subject and technical means come into perfect alignment. Flamingos (1988) presents a group of birds preening themselves in a grassy clearing. Perched on thin legs with heads curled down fluffing their feathers, the birds resemble flowers on stalks. The flamingos and their surroundings are treated with the same heightened chromatic values and freedom of paint handling. The pink plumage in the foreground and a zone of yellow sunlight spilling out from the center of the canvas in the middle ground vie for dominance, creating a tension between decorative flatness and spatial depth.

In the large Rhinoceros (c. 1990) Tavernise also uses discreet zones of color to depict her subject. The rhinoceros is seen from above, with the lower half of its body hidden by the muddy water and his back cut off by the top of the picture plane. This perspective allows the artist to get very close to the water and mud, which are treated as alternating blue and brown cascades which ooze towards the bottom of the canvas. The sunlight falling on the animal’s back illuminates the rhinoceros’ terra-cotta hide and contrasts with its dark, mud-covered face and flanks. The division of the animal’s head into dark and light halves makes it appear mask-like, as does the dangerously pointed tusk which seems to flair the surface of the picture plane. This proximity with the viewer creates a pictorial excitement that is difficult to conceive of in a painting of so much dirt, as the physicality of the exotic animal becomes a metaphor for the materiality of the painting process itself.

The zoo, with its luxuriant plants and curious animals in outdoor settings, provided a perfect terrain for Tavernise’s imagination. Like the circus and dance worlds frequented by the Post-Impressionists, Tavernise came to know this encapsulated society intimately. She would make many visits to photograph and sketch the animals who she knew by name. One of her preferred subjects is the zoo’s baboon community of whom she made multiple paintings and sketches. The title of one of these works, Things We Need to Know II (c. 1996), suggests that she viewed the group as presenting a model for human interchanges. Tavernise’s long-lasting involvement with land conservation and belief in the sanctity of the natural world informs her animal paintings, landscapes and paintings of plants (one thinks of Enlightened Cactus and Tree Lights). In a series of paintings of various waterfowl floating on the surface of lakes the theme of immersion in a liquid, light-filled environment is developed with great success.

Though she had affirmed her own formal vocabulary by the 1990s Tavernise continued to push herself to evolve, which would mean “painting like” the great painters she admired. A striking self portrait from this time, Waiting for Matisse (1994), presents the artist staring frontally out at the viewer dressed in a striped turtleneck sweater, in homage to Matisse’s iconic self portrait of 1906 in a striped shirt. Tavernise’s treatment of her left eye as a flattened diamond also recalls the Matisse; and the highly charged color palette, with dark and light values created entirely from opposing colors ranging from chrome orange to lime green, is that of the Fauves. The work avoids being derivative through a dynamic set of pictorial relationships Tavernise puts into play. If one divides the artist’s face in half, following a vertical cadmium line beneath her nose, it presents very different aspects. The artist’s right side is treated with naturalistic modeling while her left side in shadow is built from dominantly acid green tones. When seen in isolation this side appears stark and brutal compared to the glamorous other half. A tensile opposition is also created between the figure and background. A large red plant, whose petals appear to reach around the artist’s left shoulder, is juxtaposed with a dangling earring on Tavernise’s opposite ear which resembles the flower in miniature. These relationships suggest the artist’s struggles, both physical and artistic, as well as her passionate engagement with painting.

In the hundreds of paintings and studies Linda Tavernise has produced throughout her career she has bowed to the past while establishing her own voice. Though her enterprise is treacherous, she never falls into caricature or pastiche. The “secrets of color” that she dreamed of wresting from Bonnard as a young artist are explored with resolve and dedication. In works such as her late cloud paintings she employs color to exact an intense emotional response and realizes her pursuit of a pictorial idea that would be a coefficient to physical pleasure. These paintings are filled with the artist’s inflections and presence, and as Lucy Spencer states “have the quality of pooling energy around them.” The collection presented at Green Hill holds much to delight the viewer.

Edie Carpenter

Curator, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art