Teri Malo

2008 Malo Show The changing mood, energy, and abstract patterns of water along the coast provide Malo with constantly evolving subjects. Calm evenings, mornings after a storm or with views en route to the islands, the paintings evoke both brisk salt air and the hypnotic movement of the sea. Malo's clear understanding of complex pattern, underlying structure, and nuanced color is evident in this new collection of paintings. We invite you to see the latest work of this remarkable Realist painter, whose paintings are collected by DeCordova Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Newport Art Museum.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Why water? My profound interest in painting the coast, and especially the ocean, comes from several things, including a desire to spend imaginative time in this vast and bracing environment. The ocean is a moody and mysterious subject - elusive, constantly changing, and full of surprises. Understanding the abstract patterns of waves and foam, the underlying structure, and the subtle color shifts is an exciting challenge. With each painting I see more and want to dive (at least metaphorically) deeper into the wave.

Working on panels instead of canvas allows for more controlled detail - the clear, painterly brushstrokes are layered between transparent glazes, while the medium is used to blur edges and suggest the energy and movement of the water.

The restless, rhythmic quality of moving water encourages a restless response from me - I find myself going back to the source (be it Cape Ann, Maine, or Cape Cod) to find new ways of interpreting my elusive subject - a subject that is both real and abstract.

Thoughts on Painting Stones

Of course the earliest stone pieces are indeed a look at the ground, but after visiting the stone beach on Campobello Island, the series changed. What I saw there was the abstract vocabulary of the stones - all the stones were almost equally rounded and similar in size, with subtle color differences. The stones was almost like letters which could be assembled at will to form visual phrases (like letters forming words, then phrases). The arrangement of the stone "vocabulary" could evoke a philosophical question or theme - such as types of randomness, perusals of chance, what is an accident? Where does choice intersect with chance?

As a result, the newer paintings are more abstract. They aren't based so much on looking at the ground (or that particular beach) but on taking a few stones and building a theme. They are abstract paintings with the stones serving as vocabulary. I love the idea that they look like photographically real places but absolutely don't exist except in my mind and on the panel. Piet Mondrian saw the street grid of New York and built his abstract boogie woogie paintings. I think I'm doing something visually a bit similar with the stones.

The Subversive Beauty of Malo’s Beach Stones
- Jacquelyn Malone

Teri Malo’s paintings of beach stones are subversive. The viewer’s instantaneous reaction to them is mild shock at the vitality of something so ordinary, so often beneath notice. Close up and in your face, the stones assume a bold presence, strangely but naturally luminescent, capturing the radiance of sun and water as the tide laps back toward the sea, leaving the stones newly settled in a fresh cluster – like a revolution in a social order.

The order invites social, with its anthropomorphic vision. The longer you look, the more you can imagine a communal state in the stones, as if sea currents and waves mangled and shuttled their experiences the way lives are caught up and shuttled by circumstance. Some paintings highlight individual stones in a larger society while others illuminate the society as a whole. Some patterns are like a throng emerging from a coliseum, drawn around a center or eddying off to the side, or a school of fish that could vanish at the edge of the canvas in a moment; others, focusing on an individual rock, are like Dorothy picking herself up after the tornado to find a world other than Kansas. In “A Different Order,” for example, the three dark stones among the hundreds of lighter ones are slightly submerged in their pale background, as if they were hiding in the sea of otherness.

What you see as you daydream in front of one of the paintings depends partly on what you bring to the image. “Gathering” is surely a depiction of stones, but the title suggests intention, as if the stones had a political or social agenda. The painting and the title pull you into an imaginative space where the size, color, position, and luminosity suggest social dominance, with small stones clustering around larger ones like acolytes. Looking at the painting this way, the seaweed, at the side and trailing through the center, becomes mysterious, slightly ominous.

But to say the paintings’ allure is in hooking the narrative imagination is to ignore their equally powerful abstract quality. It may seem strange to mention abstraction in the face of paintings that are photo realistic, but you can’t look at a painting like “A Different Order” or “Strange Catch” without being drawn into the aesthetic content of the paintings’ structure. At some point the reality of the stones disappears into color, line, and shape, a non-figurative pattern based on internal form. Surely all paintings are concerned with composition, but as you look at Malo’s work, your mind seems to flip over, the way it can when someone suggests a different meaning for a Rorschach inkblot you’ve been seeing your own way. Suddenly the painting flips from stones to the drama of pattern. The longer you look, the more subtle the pattern’s detail.

You can look at these paintings as a vibrant depiction of a summer memory, as a narrative interaction between inanimate objects, or as a dynamic pattern of color and line. You can sink into the Malo paintings at whatever level you wish; each level has its own joys.