02/21/2013

Flowers and Fruits
Toshiko Kitano Groner

February 21 – March 6, 2013
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 21, 6-8 pm

Toshiko Kitano Groner’s paintings come to us in the same way music does, passing through our senses directly, wordless and pure. Her brilliant expressions in Flowers and Fruits gather visually with effort, like a perfectly modeled song heard for the first time.

An important element in rounding out her art is music she dreamed about while finishing college in Japan and realized as a successful singer/songwriter in Greenwich Village after she came to America. Her paintings are lyrical, instantly attractive as if tuned to the senses. Her work as a visual artist came later, fueled by her personal history. Her compositions include flow and balance in harmony, like traditional music.

Her paintings speak a universal language, images detached from place and left for the objects to express themselves. Although the visual arts have a similar dialect everywhere, Groner’s works that were inspired by visits to Japan are more color rich, the spirit of place seeming to have warmed her creativity.

Groner’s most recent paintings are realistic expressions that glow with the colors of natural life but go beyond reality. Working with oils, pastels and watercolors, she finds the essence of her objects, ordinary fruits and flowers, and invests them with tones that make them super real. Apples tumble into the frame. Her imagination treats viewers to fruits that are as much personal expression as images of colorful products of nature.

Her landscapes retain the same musical quality, as if the music she brought with her from Japan continues to play in visual space. Her roads roll forward like sheet music. Buildings appear like graceful notes that fit comfortably within a score. Harmony abounds as trees and grasses mingle into singular rural scenes.

The solo show is named Flowers and Fruits, but it could as easily have been Traditional Ballads and Folk Songs, as each painting is complete in itself, like a song. They tell their own full stories. Their visual resonance may have familiar grace notes, but no one painting is dependent on another for clarity. Each seems to have been brought to life at the end of a brush with its innermost dynamics drawn out in the colors and careful architecture.

Groner’s beautiful paintings are perfect, freestanding expressions by an artist with a talent that matches her love of color. In a universal language, they are as much American as Japanese, but the way in which she fuses a lyrical quality into every image can only be fully understood in respect to her roots in music as her creative capacities have expanded across cultures.

Thoughtful, emotional artistry like hers is the expression of a rich life, warmed by its own passionate history. That history is infused with multiple traditions.