Good Old "Homecooking"

Do you ever to stop to notice the art around you? Do you ever pause to consider the sheer beauty of color, shape and form of the physical world that is part of your daily life?

This is the question posed by Anne Gilson Haney’s exhibit “Homecooking,” which recently ended at Crosstown Gallery in Boston. The most visually exciting pieces in this exhibit grapple with these questions by reducing familiar household objects to the fundamental basics of color, shape and line. Most of Haney’s works are mixed medium—combining acrylic piant with collage items such as newspaper, wallpaper and fabric. Haney’s style is loose and employs warm vivid colors that are applied directly to the surface to create a rich and vibrant color and energy in her work.

Haney’s paintings read much like a scrapbook offering the viewer numerous glances into the domestic life of suburban America. Haney’s art tends towards abstraction, showing several motifs and scenes within one piece. She reduces household imagery such as fruit, bowls and cooking implements to their basic color and form. Haney combines shapes in a manner that emphasizes their proximity to the other shapes in the painting.

The female form is omnipresent in Haney’s work, but also appears in an abstracted manner. The forms appear as line drawings or illustrations out of 1950s household magazines and do not depict current trends and fashions. Haney’s art seems to be making a statement about female domesticity by associating a highly stylized female form with cooking implements and household items. Yet the abstract nature of her work prevents an overly didactic reading of her paintings.

Haney creates depth in her paintings through her extensive layering of household objects. Pieces of fabric, paper and other sketches are layered on top of each other to create the sense that there is always another image trying to emerge from beneath the paint. The overall effect of this layer creates a dream-like sense of space, unconstrained by classical perspective and offering a multiplicity of views. This theme is emphasized by Haney’s extensive use of actual household objects in her collage such as wallpaper and newspaper.

One of the most visually exciting pieces is entitled “Midnight Snack,” a large acrylic and collage on canvas. The viewer is immediately drawn into the piece by its bold use of raw color and vibrant brush strokes. One of the few recognizable shapes in this painting is the female form in a large cooking pot. This image could be seen as a strong social statement that the artist is trying to make, but the abstraction of the piece leaves these questions ambigious.

“Homecooking” invites the viewer to find familiar objects in art, and to find art in familiar objects.