Burton Wasserman, August 2014
Dr. Burton Wasserman is a professor emeritus of Art at Rowan University, and a serious artist of long standing.
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Donna Usher
Many years ago, Donna Usher gave up the practice of representational picture making. Inspired by a journey to Australia to study Aborigine dot-painting and undertaking an exploration of pure aesthetic expression, she broke free of making pictorial artworks based on the overt appearance of people, places and things seen in the ordinary, everyday world.
Instead, her creative focus turned toward exploring a vocabulary of circular and other assorted shapes, invented out of the depths of her imagination. While they may remind some spectators of curved cell structures, they also project the essence of a unique reality as forms with an identity entirely their own.
During September and October, 2014, Usher will hold her latest solo exhibition of new paintings in the L. G. Tripp Gallery at 47 North 2nd St. in the Olde City neighborhood of Philadelphia. As is her custom, she will offer work that vibrates with a rare measure of freshness and vitality.
In certain unmistakable ways, Usher pursues an idiom reminiscent of the approach once employed by the great Russian modernist, Wassily Kandinsky. Like him, she evolved a distinctive style of non-representational form, which is also frequently referred to as pure abstract or non-objective art.
Generally, as creative visual form becomes increasingly independent, it develops certain potentialities encountered in the world of serious music. Kandinsky, for example, felt that his language of pure design allowed him to voice profound feelings and states of mind that enabled his art to rise above reference to the mere description of objects seen in the ordinary, everyday material world.
The same possibilities have come into being in Usher’s work as the intuitive resources of her audience respond to the spiritual dimensions she has integrated into her passages of paint. Usher’s own way of expressing this notion is to say, “The interaction of vibrant color within the paintings is used to evoke sensations of the sublime for viewers to meditate upon as they study the work at hand.” “Blue Afternoon,” for example, has an unequivocally cool atmosphere, backed up as it is, with an all-over azure ground. Across this base, a range of dot patterns and linear arabesques move about each other with grace and a seemingly loose touch of quivering abandon. If one’s eyes aren’t wide open, they are destined to miss out on the abundance of fluid movement drifting across the surface in waves of rhythmic action.
Usher’s “Autumn Contemplation” offers visitors intense interactions of radiantly brilliant spectrum colors. Their ability to project dazzling fields of a rainbow presence are like kinetic energies tingling with excitement in the spaces designated by their surrounding perimeters. Areas of opacity and transparency beat out agitated interactions of visual force, joined together in superbly unified shapes that cause a viewer’s sense of being alive to reach new heights of awareness.
“Summer Contemplation” offers the connoisseur an adventure in seeing color bubbling with warmth in a combination of yellow, red, black, blue, green and white tones. They tremble with agitated energy in a universe of their own nature, without reference to any tiresome clichés from either the world of commercial art or textile design.
All of the selections in the show have to be seen up close, in order to be appreciated for their painterly vitality and sheer spiritual being. Truly, they have characteristics that are akin to deeply meaningful, non-denominational religious experiences. Without a scintilla of compromise to petty decorative charm, her compositions never pretend to be other than what they are in their own terms, as dynamic constellations of refined clarity and balanced order. Free of superficiality, they glow in the light of their own artistic integrity.