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San Diego Reader article spotlighting Julie Hoey's art.
April 8, 2004, by John Brizzolara |
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| It would be preferable, to me, to be surrounded by the artist's work while (or even rather than) writing about it. I don't have that luxury at the moment. I don't know how art critics do it, but I am not about to call myself an art critic. I have already spent eight years in the '90s creating prose supposedly for the rock and pop audience to sound out after already having attended the concert or listened to the recording in question; to be rubricked "rock critic" is punishment enough for one writing career. To be considered somewhat of a pundit on the world of the visual arts would be enough artificial self-esteem to keep me bloated for days. But I did not earn it. It is not modesty, but fact. While I did pore over my History of Art by Janson, I missed all the prerequisite parties in abandoned subway stations in lower Manhattan and the brie gorging and chablis guzzling at the Guggenheim and could never choke down a Gauloise to its end. I do, however — and I bet you guessed it — know what I like. |
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| Among things I like are several of the works of Julie Hoey currently being displayed at Studio 1031 on Ray Street in North Park, though by the time you read this the show will have closed. (The business card is so thoroughly artful it also becomes fun trying to guess the name and location of the business.) |
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| Moving from tiny canvases to larger-sized landscapes, to the art-supply store, to the grocery or laundromat — in other words, taking art, literally in stride, as part of her day. Hoey may be best described by what she is not. Hoey as artist is not wedged in there between soccer mom, yoga student, poised toward her real estate license, contriver of a social life for the recently divorced, or furious participant of all the other myriad aspects of Western life meant to comprise well-rounded or well-adjusted something or others. Those legions of unfortunates are little more than neurotics and mediocre amateurs. The ones who wonder why they're not more enlightened; after all, they've feng shui'd every room in their place and certainly have more Buddhas in their garden than the Joneses across the street. |
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| Julie Hoey certainly named all her works for me, and I dutifully read them into a tape recorder she loaned me and which I did not know how to use. So I'm going to say, What difference does it make what a work of art is called? A rose by any other name. She knows my favorite. It is, I believe you could call it, a photorealistic landscape. It depicts a lakeside or riverbed with the kind of thrashing of mood/sunlight via color you find only in nature. All of which is presided over by an ultimately triumphant amber and with the startling quality of small, lace-like waves breaking easily on the shore, revealing rocks and gravel and weed so consistently distorted by the contrived lens of water that the illusion is complete. The effect is an image so fine or restraint so nearly perfect that what the eye registers seems not to have been painted at all but somehow remembered, invoked. |
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| Her attitude to my reaction was, "Oh, I'll have to paint another one." She said this as if she were talking about replacing Kleenex. |
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| Another of her paintings, Take Heart (oil on canvas), I can see being easily dismissed as "primitive," "naive," "self-indulgent," "disingenuous," "Keene and Arbus meet Rod McKuen" except for one thing: you can't stop looking at it. Not in the car-wreck effect, but the unruly and gaudy red, clownish hair spiraling into a heart so concentrated (like an infant's fist) above eyes closed so undramatically they simply might have been forgotten. As if overlooked or abandoned, the gray eyelids serve the riot of red and play into the surface of firelight on a mystic cave painting wall rather than a clownish mascot logo for Sadburgers. |
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| Her miniature landscapes please me because I think they remind me of artwork for unwritten paperback classics: ones that have yet to provide me the peace and pleasure they promise. |
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