By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, 6/11/2004

Branching out
Amy Ross, another painter of animals, has a new show up at Allston Skirt, in which she has taken a great leap with her work. Ross, who went to Harvard Divinity School, once painted black sheep and scapegoats on striped grounds. The stripes (painted, ironically, in retrospect, with Martha Stewart-brand wall paint) echoed back to the stripes worn on prisoners' uniforms. The works had a bright, innocent appeal and a dark underbelly.

Ross has left the stripes behind, although her sense of the weird remains intact. She has made works on paper and luscious, huge wall drawings depicting magnolia branches. These are exquisitely rendered, and if that were all that was going on it would almost be enough.

But there's more: lambs and billy goats pop out from amid the languid petals of some of the magnolias. In one drawing on paper, a goat seems to call out to a flower on another branch. In another, a lamb smiles benignly, its ear flopping over like another petal. The wall drawings show the same thing, many times larger. The animals have wonderful personalities. It's as if Ross is reclaiming the world for the scapegoats, insisting that we view them with affection instead of fear.

Lovely and hopeful as these works are, they offer up an idea rich with possibility, but not yet fully conceived. I want to see these fauna in full bloom; I want them to wither and fall to the grass. I want a bit of darkness back.

This story ran on page D20 of the Boston Globe on 6/11/2004.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Back to E-Zine Archive | Page Two | Main Menu