The art of the dance is much like the dance of art. They are both about movement, energy and the joy of the moment. Whether you hear the music or visualize it in a drawing or painting, you feel it just the same.

When you look at Mary Curtin’s paintings of dancing figures, from Anchor Wat or Africa, the music vibrates, and you feel the air move with and around the figures. And yet when her figures rest, they are very still, and a quiet descends on the canvas and draws you into a world of reflection and the memories of countless lives.

All of Mary’s works share a “stone-like” texture with the addition of beeswax and poured latex paint. She applies fabrics, handmade papers and the scraps of life. She doesn’t paint landscapes, but elements of the landscape are there in her work.

The texture is important – a contribution to the visual through the reflection of light – and directly influences the subject matter and the overall color composition. With rusts and cobalt blues dominating, the work has the “dug-up look” that Mary is after. It becomes a portrait of time.

Mary began drawing with her artist mother at an early age and later studied photography in Greece. She studied in California before getting her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Corcoran School of Art. She has been showing in the area ever since. You still have a few days – to Aug. 4 – to see her work at the Touchstone Gallery, and she has a solo show on Capitol Hill during August at 1119 G St. NE, with a theme of dancing at H Street. For more information, e-mail mccurtin@dcaccess.net or call 202-546-2777.

Jim Magner’s Thoughts on Art
There was a time of certainty that beautiful scenes should be painted and that the paintings themselves should be pleasing. There was no doubting that; it was widely held though all economic classes. Love of art went well below the aristocratic upper crust – it was a very public concern.

It was a time when people could get excited just about how a scene was presented. It was a question of style – about how the paint was applied and what color variations were used. Over the centuries in Western art – European and American – certain expectations were established. There were a few differences depending on the country or subculture, but there were certainly rules.

Then came the Impressionists who broke those strict and rigid rules about how a scene or subject should be rendered. Oh no! Brush strokes could be seen, and colors were just lying there, raw, next to each other to leave it to the eye to blend them together – to actually finish the painting – what the artist was supposed do. It was an assault upon traditional values – those professional standards bestowed from on high by the academies.

But that was then. Breaking rules became acceptable, and the younger generation almost immediately began looking for a post-impressionist style. Others began poking around, looking for ways to shock the establishment and shake things up a bit.

Shock and awe eventually became an end in itself, both in the application of aesthetics and the raw, in-your-face, rip-something-up subject matter. Now nothing is new, nothing shocks, and it is again an allowed pleasure to look at all the art that art rebelled against.

You may be personally enthralled by impressionism because it seems so “old fashion” like painting should be. That it came crashing on to the art scene of the mid-19th century with much ado – even shock and derision – seems odd to us now.

The show currently at the Phillip’s Collection, “American Impressionism,” (see At the Museums) allows you to guiltlessly lose yourself in American scenes beautifully painted while deriving some satisfaction that it was all part of some rebellion or other.           

At the Museums

American Impressionism
The Phillips Collection
1600 21st St. NW
To Americans who care about paintings, Degas, Monet, Manet, Pissaro and Renoir are the A Team of “The Impressionists” – to some, the A Team of all art. But we Americans had some pretty fair impressionist painters as well. The names, unfortunately, are familiar almost exclusively to artists and art historians: Twactman, Weir, Chase, Hassam, Robinson and even Prendergast are names not likely to show up on Jeopardy.

Like many American painters before World War II, they were considered quaint…provincial, and not to be confused with, or displayed with, the real deal – the great French guys. As a result, they have been relegated to the B Team by popular opinion and some critics. The cultural inferiority complex continues to this day among those not really familiar with the strength of the American vision.

Happily, the young Duncan Phillips was not one of those people. Beginning in 1912, he collected 87 works by 25 different artists. He saw the Americans as possessing a poetry – a straightforward love of place as well as excellence of the work itself. They had first discovered the French Impressionists in an exhibit in New York in 1886 and adapted their painting techniques and many of their aesthetic values.

They worked outdoors (en plein air), painting directly on the canvas with no preliminary drawings or paintings. The impressionists used brighter colors, with colored shadows and flickering brush strokes. What distinguished the Americans was an emotional response to the land and a love of sights and scenes uniquely American – mostly rural New England.

See for yourself. “American Impressionism: Paintings from the Phillips Collection” brings together over 65 masterworks for the first time in a generation. These are the paintings that are beloved by just about everyone. The exhibit continues through Sept. 16. For more information, call 202-387-2151 or visit www.phillipscollection.org.