Leah Keller-Transburg
"Spirit, Dust and Fire"
Cafe de Troit
Exhibition runs March 1 through March 31, 2005. Keller-Transburg will also show at Cafe de Troit with a second body of work for the month of April.
1260 Library Street, Detroit

Lee Padgett's Cafe de Troit continues to prove why some publications have labeled it the best non-art gallery to see art. Artist Leah Keller-Transburg's often brightly colored and always lively rendered abstractions bring a vibrancy and energy to the cafe walls. From the large uniquely formatted works that fill the cafe's back room to the smaller, more traditional pieces, and a number of drawings, Keller-Transburg offers up an expansive and cohesive body of work that satisfies a viewer's need for continuity yet diversity between pieces and allows one to really get inside the artist's creative process.

The show is highlighted by "renaissance x" a large scale painting comprised of four equal sized rectangles hung together in somewhat pinwheel fashion. The positioning of the four panels mirrors the whorl of colors that flows through the entire composition. Despite the gap separating the canvases, Keller-Transburg's brush strokes leap across that divide uniting them into a single piece. The paint is applied thick, yet each color retains its distinct purity. The direction of her marks and this heavy paint application display a lineage with Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or more locally and contemporarily to the abstractions of Detroit painter Gilda Snowden. Keller-Transburg plays with the theme of dynamic bursts of spiraling color throughout an entire "renaissance" series allowing her to explore some truly fertile territory.

The origins of these works might be found in a much quieter body of work located in the cafe's hallway. Here Keller-Transburg displays some straight forward observational black and white ink drawings of long-stemmed field weeds, shown root to tip, stretching just beyond the dimensions of the paper. At first, these "studio weeds" might seem unrelated to the dynamic, vivid paintings, but this is not so. With simplified, clean drawings she captures the essence of growth found within natural forms. Directly opposite are black and white abstractions that stem naturally from the observational works. Here the growth rate has accelerated - literally exploded - we are witnessing development not at a single moment in time but in rapid motion. The paint is put on in a mad dance of activity, almost a spattering, like plants reaching wildly for the sun or spermatozoa racing against their countless brethren. This explosion of life which began so calmly evolves across Keller-Transburg's canvases to become the energetic, bold, spiral-filled pieces.

Through the repeated use of spiral forms and by constructing many of her canvases (including all four parts of "renaissance x") to the dimensions of the "golden rectangle" or "golden ratio", Keller-Transburg also draws a connection to the mathematics of nature. The golden ratio is so named because of the curious mathematical properties concerning the ratio of its length to its width which have been observed since classical Greek periods and have long been put in use in art and architecture for its universally pleasing dimensions. Over the years this ratio was found to be all over the place in nature, and recently the connection between the mathematics and nature has been understood in greater detail. Without going into the mathematics here, simply stated, the golden ratio is an inherent feature in natural growth processes. Keller-Transburg's use of the spiral links her work to this fundamental property of growth which reveals itself prominently from DNA to the arrangement of seeds on the head of a flower to galaxies (and even cream mixing into coffee!), all similar to that most familiar natural spiral - the nautilus shell.

From form to color, Keller-Transburg's work is a celebration of creation - both in terms of life and the artistic process. It's a vital and joyful visual experience. - Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com

For more info, www.leahkellertransburg.com