Recent Acquisitions: Patricia Tobacco Forrester

Excerpt from: "Exhibits Offer Several Views of Nature."
By Graham Shearing.

Michael Berger Gallery has taken over the University of Pittsburgh's gallery in the Frick Fine Arts Building to show two exhibitions, "Nature as Muse I" and "Nature as Muse II."

They are quite different and equally rewarding. The first, watercolors by the atmospherically named Patricia Tobacco Forrester, are vivid, immediate and effective.

But you are tricked into thinking they are of a type, for they are not those decorative expanses often hung over sofas and fireplaces. Instead, you see large, colorful paintings into which you can almost walk, not because they are models of naturalism, but because they seem to pull you into the work physically, a sensation increased by a certain concavity of the works themselves (which are not framed, but pinned to something like a stretcher).

Nature, the muse here, is somewhat exaggerated and intense. These are from the life, painted en plein air, of identifiable things and places. But it is as if Forrester has passed a huge magnifying glass over her subject, distorting and rediscovering it, subtly shifting the balance of its elements to her purpose.