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Art
If I Were a Carpenter
Cindy Blair gives her interpretations of buildings and light in two exhibits.
by JESSICA DHEERE
What do the swanky foyer of the architectural firm Askew Nixon Ferguson and the worn-aroundthe-edges downtown Cossitt Branch of the Memphis Public Library have in common? Not much.
Askew Nixon Ferguson's grand space draws you in to look around. The orange industrial carpet at the
Cossitt Branch and the emphatically roped-off second floor scream keep out. Still, if you look hard
enough, you might notice that both places are currently exhibiting Cindy Blair's paintings of
architecture and light. And consequently, these two spaces have been united like never before, and
probably never again.
The paintings are of buildings, sometimes identifiable, sometimes not without some help from the
title. But they are also paintings of light and of color, experiments in a flat, canvas-like world,
explanations of what happens when pigment is added and layered in colors that simulate the prismatic
wavelengths of light. No, they're not rainbows; they're translations from the color that we see around
us because of the addition of light to the manipulation of color (paint, watercolor, pastel, etc.) on a flat
surface that deceives the human eye into perceiving three dimensions.
Every child has been confused by a science teacher who says white is the combination of all colors
and disappointed when they fail to prove that this is true by mixing all the tempera colors in their
paint set together and see, not a magical transformation to white, but only mud-puddle brown. What
they haven't yet learned is what Blair already knows, that light and pigment are not interchangeable,
and that it takes a lot of observation and practice to be able to translate from one to another.
A personal statement written by Blair for a 1994 exhibition states that she "prefers to study light and
form as entirely separate entities, while focusing on an aesthetic relationship between the two." This is
evident in all of her works in which architectural details are seemingly forgotten and the only division
between two structures' walls or windows and walls is the segue from one color into another color. In
On a Side Street in Bristol (at Cossitt), it is the metamorphosis from the facade's orange into the
shadowed inside edge of the windows' purple.
Works hanging in the Cossitt Library Gallery date from 1994. Most of them depict flat, frontal
building facades like the white grid in Chicago. On Sunday encloses light and dark gray and sea green
squares that imply the green, mirrored glass that seems to lurk on the outside of 1980s office towers.
Her buildings are illuminated by an unseen and often unfixed light source.
Her clean lines and blocks of color tend to simplify forms, eliminating details like cornices, window
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sills, the articulation of bricks, evidence of wind on the awnings, mirror reflections, or the passage of
time in peeling paint. The closest Blair gets to this kind of detail is the gutter affixed to the side of the
burger bar in the painting of the same name (Cossitt) or the marquee-like lights in Casino (ANF). This
simplification is further emphasized by the lack of human figures, and thus narrative, in any of her
paintings. Not until Casino and Arcade do we even get to read the letters of a sign. Burger Bar is
blank and Hatley's isn't named by anything other than its distinctive shape and Midtown prominence.
Blair lets the architecture alone talk about the function and doesn't really worry about whether or not
you get it; you will. Even the blue skies succumb to the architecture and color and light and constitute
little more than a background.
Blair is the first to admit that her buildings don't always work perspectively, that is. Her creative
process begins with taking a number of photos and making pencil drawings and oil sketches from
these pictures. Sometimes during the process, the protrusion and recession of angles becomes so
complicated that she chooses to simplify her task by painting from a viewpoint that may not be
possible in real life, a cross between Albertian perspective and M.C. Escher, let's say. Sometimes,
though, says Blair, she just likes the look of one isolated element, like a staircase, from a different
angle that doesn't necessarily correspond to the rest of the painting.
Blair completed Casino just a couple of weeks ago, immediately before the opening at Askew Nixon
Ferguson. Askew Nixon Ferguson commissioned the painting from Blair to commemorate the design
success of a large-scale project. After sorting through various candidates, the artist and the architects
agreed that the Sam's Town Casino project satisfied both requirements, and the result now hangs on
the far wall of their foyer.
You can also see Blair's work in upcoming exhibits at the Memphis College of Art and the Ledbetter
Lusk Gallery.
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