Selected Essays & Reviews

Darren Waterston

Review by Paul Gardner, ARTnews, March 2004

Darren Waterston's musical and mystical pools of abstraction, in a series of oil-on-wood paintings titled "Ghosts," evoke moonlight dips into strange but seductive depths. Waterston's work, often executed with an interplay of light and shadow, is emphatically atmospheric, but, here, the artist emerged from the shadows with a directness and simplicity that opened a universe of poetic dreams.

On a visit to Japan a few years ago, Waterston was intrigued by the animistic Shinto religion, which embraces nature spirits like wind and water. Using hazy grays, airy whites, and chilly blacks with toasty beiges, he achieves a serene lightness and abstract clarity, creating a delicate sense of awe in a world of contemplation. A subtle melancholy, along with a sense of fleeting time, imbues Chimera, one of the artist's larger works in a show intelligently scaled (not grandiose). The artist's deliberately minimal palette creates watery whispers and rustles on a floating surface that breathes heavily and sweetly.

Waterston, who has also designed stage sets for classical ballet, admires the Czech artist Frantisek Kupka, who captured, he says, "an internal movement." Both physical and spiritual motion are keenly felt in Waterston's art. He steps gracefully between the inner and the outer worlds, which are at once illusionary and defiantly real.