KAREN DREHER
FITZROY LIBRARY EXHIBITION SPACE
5 April - 31 May 2008
My Many Moods
A selection of acrylic works on canvas 2006-8
Beauty by Nature, acrylic on canvas, 91cm x 61cm, 2008
Most of Karen’s 18 acrylics on canvas dealt with the female form in different ways to the usual posed nude or portrait. Each one reflected a different mood, situation or expression. In Beauty by Nature the nude, with her back to the viewer, looked out over atmospheric grey sky and water. The Funny Girl series of four works showed head and shoulder female portraits with some very creative hairdos on striking red backgrounds. Funny Girl 1 was particularly whimsical with her tower of black hair. I wondered how many of these works were whimsy or self portrait or both. Pensive Woman was a more serious portrait of a girl in a black dress, leaning on the back of a chair against a simple but effective pink background. As in many of her works apart from the abstracts, the images were hard edged flat colour with great dark/light contrasts. The girl in Waiting sat at a bare dining table in a darkened living room, with a fixed and serious expression and her shoes prominently to one side. Who or what could she be waiting for, in this enigmatic work?
Searching, acrylic on canvas, 76cm x 100cm, 2006
It took me a moment to find the female form in the semi-abstract work titled Searching, in which a white-faced, voluminously gold-clad form enveloped in an aura-like haze flew through darkness.
Karen also showed her moods and feelings in other ways without the human image, including After the Rain, an abstract whose colours and forms expressed the ochre earth and green foliage on a white (wet?) background. I particularly liked Green Days with its painterly blocks of greens and blues with pale hints of flowers and linear forms. I thought these colourful and often cheerful and amusing works lended themselves very well to the Fitzroy Library’s bluestone walls and the dark red backed display cases.
Review by Cressida Fox