Art Review: Colorful pieces best on larger scale

Leya Evelyn, "Chance Meetings"

Visit Harrington Brown Gallery on a gray gloomy day, of which there seem to be an abundance this month, and you will be revitalized by the brilliantly colored paintings of Leya Evelyn. On display through April 5, these abstract pieces glow within their square or rectangular shapes in vivid greens and blues, reds and oranges, drenched with saturated hues like beacons of enigmatic friendliness.

Evelyn is an American who moved to Nova Scotia in the early 1980s. Though widely exhibited in Canada, the Northeast and Europe, she has not shown her work in the South, and we are fortunate to have it here for the next few weeks.

In 1959 and '60, the artist studied at Yale with German-born American artist Josef Albers (1888-1976), whose experiments with color juxtaposition offer an appeal to rational order that is somehow both Germanic and Zen-like. (Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has one of his "Homage to the Square" paintings in its collection, executed in 1957 and purchased in 1960 by Art Today.)

Not for Evelyn, however, is her teacher's meticulously geometrical approach; her paintings are brash and bright, gestural and layered (with pigment and fabric collage elements), each color, mark and swath a testimony to its own making, so the painting is not only an object of contemplation but also a history of itself.

The artist's approach produces best results on a scale large enough for her generous vision to flex its muscles and resolve itself, even while she allows a few loose ends here and there, so neither the paintings nor we the viewers become complacent. At sizes ranging from 42-by-42 inches to 60-by-60 inches or even 60-by-80, there's sufficient room for a blending of intonations, meaning that the same picture plane may contain, like a map of an unknown continent, passages of sunny tranquility, sly wit and dark confusion. These pieces display the confidence of an artist of long practice, sure hand, steady eye -- and a penchant for playfulness.

Less successful are smaller pieces (Every gallery owner, it seems, wants examples of compact, more affordable art, and who can blame them?) that feel constricted and truncated. In fact, at 12-by-12 inches, the four paintings in the "Redirecting" series seem eagerly and anxiously to be redirecting our attention to the more satisfying larger works.

Good examples of those are in Evelyn's "I Knew about It Anyway" series, each of which offers not only the business and busyness -- she doesn't shy away from some fussy, slightly glamorized details -- of the artist's manner but also a few "gotcha" moments, as if she were saying to viewers, "Beautiful stuff, huh, but I told you so!"

These paintings, at a comfortable 46-by-46 inches, present dominant fields of mottled, worked-over pigment -- blue, green, yellow, snow-white -- whose expanses are whittled at the edges by patches of flowered cloth, hastily rendered circles and squares and the artist's signature motif, the rough oval, sometimes traced in paint with the tiny, rounded end of the brush handle, more frequently painted in black or blue, orange or pink or white.

The oval theme, both soft enclosure and quick gesture, anchors these paintings, from one to the other, but occasionally falls into mechanical utterance, even glibness. Perhaps a more sparing use would lend the device more power. Overall, however, they contribute a unifying force to an exhibition that already revels in strength and complexity.

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"Leya Evelyn"

At Harrington Brown Gallery, 5179 Wheelis Drive, through April 5. Call 590-3008.

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