Paintings

Livelihood: Painting the passage of time

Delicate, temporal flowers live in face of death, anchoring local artist’s show

BY LAURA J. TUCHMAN
The Register

For all their drooping, shriveled forms. Carol Goldmark’s flowers seem very much alive.

Often they twist and curl over each other, filling even the edges of their canvases with brilliant, light-filled color. At other times. they float apart, as if fighting petal-destroying winds with a surreal sort of inner power.

But it is Goldmark’s highly focused work that carries the most quizzical (pardon the pun) drawing power. For all their painstaking vision (Goldmark may spend a day on just a small section of one drawing), these are not hard-edged botanical renderings replete with fine-grained pistils and stamens.

No matter how closely one looks, one finds a delicate softness. Exacting minutiae matter little here.

“Probably of all the things that are beautiful in the world, they (flowers) last the shortest,” she says. “The colors are the most spectacular, the forms are complex and yet in the blink of an eye they’re gone – in terms of a lifespan.”

For Goldmark, flowers became a metaphor for the passage of time – and of life.

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FROM MY GARDEN

FLEURS MORTES