A Love Letter to LA Offers a Haunting Magic
at Launch Gallery, Los Angeles (through November 16)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Magic is the word that first comes to mind when describing the two-artist exhibition currently at Launch Gallery. A Love Letter is an exhibition of landscapes — quintessentially Los Angeles landscapes — that serve as landmarks for both the city’s, and the artists’, zeitgeist.
While the very word “landscape” is meant to describe the portrayal of scenic views, in this exhibition that scenery encompasses more than a cityscape or forest; it includes a personal landscape, a view of the world as defined by the City of Angels in which the artists reside. Both seem clearly in love with the town whose very name conjures images of winged beings flitting among the neon signs and hiking paths, past palms and flowering trees, bringing both darkness and light, perhaps intertwined.
The result for these artists are works that feature a profusion of light and a realm of surprising stillness even in the most urban of scenes. Trees abound — Lynne McDaniel’s trees are often a forest, deciduous or evergreen, and while taken from her own walks in the LA area, they have a quality that essentially defines LA; Lindsey Warren focuses on palms, and when she includes other trees they have a more exotic, decidedly Southern California nature.
Warren has created vibrant oil-on-canvas works that fully embrace the film-industry-coined description of the “Magic Hour,” that brief time when the blue sky goes gold before fading into an overripe sunset. Her images are stylistically heightened photorealism, depicting buildings and traffic lights, palm trees and street scenes, all under near-twilight and ever-glowing skies. The views represent a time that seems to be an eternal summer, a narrative California dream constructed from landscape. Warren tells her story of the city, capturing its architecture, flora and fauna, and above all the quality of its sky — of day on the edge of transition into night.
