paintings are not at all what you would expect, knowing she also works as a for local law enforcement agencies.
Her current show, “The Art Is in the Act of Becoming,” is free-flowing and unpredictable, full of color and mystery, not at all like the deliberate marks she puts on paper as crime victims describe the rapists and bank robbers she helps to catch or the faces she re-creates from long-dead corpses so police can identify bodies.
With paint, she gives up strict control, squirting color over color on canvas and allowing the medium to swirl around and react as it will. She relates her process to fluid dynamics, a scientific notion that explores how the Earth’s liquids and gases churn and mingle with things around them.
That puts the work right at home at the in Boulder. For 40 years, NCAR has made the exhibition of science-inspired art part of its mission.
gallery is non-traditional — its main space doubles as the walls of its large cafeteria — but within that, the agency has shown art connected to everything from tectonic shifts to climate change.
Marsh’s work evokes satellite images taken of the planet from far above. Look closely, and with some imagination, and you can make out winding lakes and deep on the surface, you can see clouds part to reveal mountains and lava flows.
That’s fiction, of course. Marsh isn’t representing anything true to life with her pieces, though maybe she is getting at something. Is the way that acrylic paint — sometimes pure, sometimes juiced up with water or varnish to change its properties — mixes together so different from the way rocks and rivers join together over centuries? Things sure appear the same.
Like a scientist, Marsh’s role in her paintings is mostly that of an observer. She does start the process by applying the layers of color, but then she lets things take their course, watching as reds, yellows and blues coalesce. The darker colors, with heavier pigment, tend to sink, while lighter colors float.
The paint has its own ideas and can wind up anywhere. One work, called “Nowhere to Land,” ends with white and yellow veins stringing along the bottom, while various blues swirl toward the top. Another, “tear space rip time expand” has fiery orange and yellow flame-like wisps circling a deep red pool. In every case, paint oozes beyond the front of the canvas and over its sides.
Marsh invades the process most directly when she stops it, when the formations are appealing and she lets the pieces dry.
It’s difficult to see the sketch artist in here, though you want to somehow connect the idea that small parts add up to a whole, that getting the nose or the eye shape right in a composite drawing is somehow similar to laying color on color until an abstract painting is perfectly finished.
Best to give that up, and allow these works to simply exist. Marsh is a delicate crime-fighting crafter, but she’s also an artist, and here she leaves the details to chance, instead of memory.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
“THE ART IS IN THE ACT OF BECOMING.” Recent abstract paintings by Cynthia Marsh at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Drive, Boulder. Through Jan. 31. Free. 303-497-1000 or ncar.ucar.edu.
