Gretchen Durst Jacobs’ art exhibit highlights the marrying of stillness and movement

Through their enclosures created from branches and brambles, these landscapes speak to the tension in Durst Jacob’s work.

On view through Oct. 19 at the Dana L. Wiley Gallery, the paintings are rooted in several dualities. There are recurring hard-edged grids that, combined with loose gestural marks, create contrasting picture planes.

The grids, created either with tape or by drawing lines freehand, act like armature that contains inside the areas of looser paint application. Durst Jacobs refers to them as “bundles”, but they could also be thought of as ribs that hold within the more emotive aspects of the paintings, ones of movement and color.

The most satisfying moments in the work happen when the process appears enigmatic, for example, in a landscape format painting titled “Secrets”. Underneath the trope of the white grid, the paint has a luminescence that was created by blotting a layer of fluid paint away with a towel.

The technique of blotting and removal, reminiscent of the soak-stain paintings of abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, creates a ghost of an image. A parallel technique was used for “Mars in Virgo”, a painting on wax-infused mulberry paper that glows in magenta, ochre and teal.

It was created by pulling impressions off a different painting, a nod to Jacob’s printmaking background as the president of the Dayton Printmakers Cooperative.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

This method of monoprinting was repeated until the artist was satisfied with the composition. In this area of the show, the sheets of painted paper are illuminated from behind by wall lights, arranged on the wall to create the effect of dappled lighting.

Inspiration came from sunlight weaving through the leaves of a tree into her McPherson Town home studio.

It’s the “not knowing” that excites Jacobs. Colors that accidentally mix when blotted together, or the unpredictable diffusion that happens when water is added to a layer of paint.

When the work is driven by gesture there is an emphasis on using the “wrist over the arm”. In other words, a goal of efficiently depicting a brushstroke or transfer of paint by using the whole body. Jacobs compares this to Jackson Pollock, whose approach she called a state of mind.

Agnes Martin is another ab-ex inspiration whose work Jacobs says came from a place of stillness rather than movement. This duality that she also sees at play in her work she refers to as “head/gut” logic.

Credit: Contributed

Credit: Contributed

“Huron and Sky” is a painting inspired by Lake Huron in Canada, and a departure from the rest of the work in the exhibit. Incorporating the concept of “sacred geometry” — patterns found in nature that are believed to have spiritual meaning — Jacobs explored themes of mapping. The painting moves beyond the grid to incorporate circles and dots, and a nod to chaos theory, the idea that tiny changes can be part of a complex chain that lead to significant events.

The infamous example is the butterfly effect — a seemingly insignificant moment of a butterfly fluttering its wings leads, through a complex chain of events, to a devastating tornado.

“Painting is like cooking,” said Jacobs from the second floor Front Street gallery.

“Should I add this? Does it need something? Is it too much of something?”

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