Ribbons in the breeze
Lorraine Rastorfer, from Wellington, has an exhibition of abstract painting on show at Zimmerman Art Gallery during March.
As if on the gentle breeze of a mostly still March day, the ribbons of Lorraine Rastorfer’s paintings are being blown around in Zimmerman Art Gallery in Palmerston North.
The thing about abstract art is it’s hard for an art reviewer. There are none of those threads (no pun intended) of narrative to latch on to, so the tendency to wax lyrical takes over.
And although you could try and think of Rastorfer’s works as if of flax, leaves or gently curving grasses, as ribbons or seaweed floating in a pond, we all know that they are patterning. Patterning that is sensuous curves and rhythms, transecting and interlacing in an array, not grasses or forms but delicate, fluid, ephemeral movement.
They are painted using some sort of tool, presumably of the same sort as those wood graining rollers with which people make faux veneers, by moving the tool across the board surface, widening and narrowing the markings probably due to the angling in the holding.
It’s all in the wrist-work, you could say. So she can spool out ribbons, twirling and turning, physically trapping that sense of movement on to the painting board. So if they are ‘about’ anything, it is the fluid gesture of paint.
But when you whittle down a process, it is amazing how differently it can be spun with any adaptation at all. So if you change the colour, it can give a completely new flavour of what the artwork could be about.
In Well Being, 2016, a bright red makes up the background, a red I think of as in Chinese lacquering, full and bold that suggests happiness.
And here, in the painting, the ribboning seems to traipse down one side and across the bottom in a ‘happy-go-lucky’ dance of contentment. Likewise, a more crowded intermeshing of lines can create a different atmosphere.
In The Hunt, 2016, with a well filled square picture, the tangle of paths within the lattice makes us look in to seek some prey. Inhabit, 2016, is also ‘full’, so much so that the background has less dominance than the swirling ribbons.
In Wayfarer II, 2017, our eyes are led diagonally across the painting as we follow the voyage. Diagonals seem to work especially well as they allow a longer stride.
As paintings go, it is an immediate pleasure, the movements suave and confident.
They do not seek to define or detail but are a simple love of movement to create aesthetic studies.