Michael Hurson at Paula Cooper - New York

Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-86) depicts gatherings of people at ease in a landscape alive with details. There is a boat with sails unfurled, rowers and a coxswain in the distance; in the middle and foreground are strollers with parasols, dogs and a monkey, a little girl in white, a halation of foliage above, long shadows on lawns that recede into space. In a suite of seven small drawings made after a reproduction of the Seurat, Michael Hurson conveys various degrees of detail with the incisive characteristics of engraving and drypoint, solidified with gouache and softened with pastel, sometimes alluding obsessively to Seurat's Pointillist technique.

The provisional Seurat Drawing #1 (December 1/2, 2000) is all but unrecognizable, the most familiar figures eclipsed by a frenzy of gouache and graphite, ink crosshatching and a rapid, agitated line. Seurat Drawing #2 (January 1/2, 2001) is studded with a staccato attack of ink dots and dashes of correction fluid that suggest the patterns of wind on the surface of the Seine. The third through sixth drawings occupied much of Hurson's time in February 2001. In the third, the sailboat emerges more clearly in the distance and the dots are relegated to the foreground; the verticals of a grid are established by the fourth. Pastel and charcoal suggest an increasingly bosky atmosphere. Although the drawings never really open up to color, the lawn of the sixth turns an autumnal, almost wintry yellow, and the drawing of March 2/4, 2001 that concludes Hurson's season is subsumed in blue and gray and white.

In each, Hurson unfailingly reiterates two minor motifs. Seurat's puff of cloud presides in the upper left-hand corner, its almost solar oval fixed in a remote bit of sky. Mysteriously, Hurson also returns to a small scrap of business hovering just to the right of the seated figures in the foreground. The form suggests a butterfly or some incidental bit of litter and casts no shadow. In the drawings' mystery and accomplishment, Hurson indicates the form's irreducible presence by striking it through with an X, as a sign of authorship, perhaps--a monogram like Whistler's butterfly. In these ways and others, Hurson's drawings lay claim to and renew the elements of Seurat's painting, invigorating the familiar in the process.

Hurson's command of traditional techniques also vivifies four drawings of articulated Fishing Lures (2001), each rendered from the same models in a horizontal grid. Collaged toothpick hooks dangle from walleyed tackle fingerlings, while the anthropomorphic skeletal structure of a small frog in one drawing suggests the affinity of fisherman and lure. The vertical conversation of Study for the Musicians (Work in Progress, April 16, 2000) introduces players at their instruments--bass, violin, cello--and a singer leaning against a piano. As oval faces and hands compose the notations of a score, the scale of the musicians' bodies suggests the ambitions of a work of mural size.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group