Adelaide Tyrol, artist

REVIEW: Christian Science Monitor

 

Contemporary Visions

By Christine Hamm

“Art alone is eternal." That’s a phrase we all know, or at least have heard. But Mary McGowan of McGowan Fine Art also believes that art can be as new as the morning headlines, a point of view graphically displayed in the gallery’s current show, ”Three East Coast Painters”

McGowan has assembled the work of three contemporary women artists, two with New Hampshire connections and one from Vermont. Visitors to the Hills Avenue Gallery should expect a departure from the kind of approach usually seen this far north of Boston.

Adelaide Murphy Tyrol is adroit, so much so, that when McGowan first came across her work at the Richardson-Clarke Gallery in Boston, she wanted to meet her immediately. Tyrol paints nature, not macro as in landscapes but micro as in the minutiae of insects and budding flowers. A reviewer called her , “an expressionist John James Audubon, or a Roger Tory Peterson, with a humorous wink and an poke in the ribs.”

Tyrol’s “Whirligig” is an exquisite bug, executed with a draftsman’s precision and an artist’s leap of fancy. The beetle-like insect is a torpedo on the prowl, its inky green body half in and half out of the pea green water. Tyrol, who lives in the verdant countryside of Marshfield, Vermont, knows her subjects well, In another show, she described a praying mantis as a “saw with two blades” and “the only insect that can direct her gaze at will.” Like the world she has chosen to portray, Tyrol’s paintings are rich and luminous but likewise curious and dark.

OTHER REVIEWS:

Lesley University Magazine, Art Institute of Boston

The Boston Globe

Christian Science Monitor

Artsmedia

Seven Days

Central Vermont Medical Center

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