Haines Gallery

August 1992

Artweek

Tony Reveaux

August 6, 1992

An image of a moth, risen from the chrysalis, may be an apt metaphor for the emerging artist. Cheryl Coon is one who demonstrates a genuine and authentic strength that is still in the process of reaching towards a more consummate realization. In several of her paintings, completed last year, a common theme is the central presence of a simply wrapped and bound cocoon-like form resting on a plane or within shelf-like structures. In these four large paintings, the moth, emergent and ascendant, is the subject.

Those works in which the moth figure dominates the space over ground are the more persuasive. The Kafka Moth (1992) and Emergence (1992) reveal the more expressive and controlled articulation of Coon’s technique. In a dedicated sculptural application of encaustic’s materiality, she trowels, brushes, cuts, spreads and glazes planes of impasto so that the moth – seen from above or on a wall – thrusts a rough, chalky aura of both fragility and strength as it hovers above the hard greenish yellow background. It is in works such as the two-panel Ascension (1992) and If Wishes Were Wings (1992) that the background volumes of color and texture churn and roil in waves of local action, but whose unresolved resolutions drain strength from the overall composition. Coon is a committed painter who needs to evolve her own personal unified field theory to fulfill the reaches of her imagination.