Fiber art, paintings beautifully juxtaposed

The Italian poet and humanist, Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), maintained that sameness was the mother of disgust and variety the cure.

By this axiom, Phillips Gallery's main exhibit — fiber art by Sharon Alderman and paintings by Deborah Hake Brinckerhoff — must be the most pleasant panacea in town. The juxtaposition of the artists' works emphasizes a polarity of style, design, theme, technique and presentation.

It's a joy to behold.

Alderman's weavings are delicate, geometric/grid landscapes seething with subtle, harmonious colors.

"Color is my passion," Alderman writes in her artist's statement. "While I occasionally weave a cloth using only one color, the joy of combining colors, mixing colors in the cloth, is the major reason I am a weaver."

Each work in the exhibit is double woven from cotton sewing thread — nearly 200 threads per square inch — which gives Alderman a smooth optical mixture. She gathers her colors from many sources, carrying sewing thread color charts and a notebook with her when she travels.

Her pieces, which are not large, range in impact from the opulence of "Aglow" to the whispering hues of "Grand Canyon at the River's Edge."

Alderman has shown in competitions and invitational exhibitions all over North America. In 1993 she was represented in the National Museum of Women's Art in Washington, D.C. Her fiber art is part of myriad collections.

What Alderman's art is to intimacy, Brinckerhoff's is to exuberancy — each painting creates a rhythmic agitation born of thickly applied paint, audacious colors, fearless forms and unpredictable narrative themes, especially in her figurative pieces.

As a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, it is no wonder her design sense is strong.

In her artist statement, Brinckerhoff states that her paintings are "representational of the subject, but not necessarily accurate to real life." This admission, however, does not diminish her paintings' capacity to convey interesting, often whimsical, messages.

In several of her pieces she includes a bull, which, for her, symbolizes power. With "Cucumber Glasses," Brinckerhoff positions a very austere, determined woman in front a sedate bull. In "Ferdinand," a demure woman in a hat stands behind a commanding, dominant steer.

One of the more intriguing aspects of her figurative work is the varied expressions the artist manages to achieve on her nearly-deconstructed characters' faces.

"With human figures, my goal is to allow the paint to dictate image," she writes. "I value wrinkles and scars, where we bend, where we break, how we lose our power and how we gain it back." As a result of Brinckerhoff's goal, her paintings tend to be more abstracted.