Collages, oils and drawings, mostly on the theme of children’s activities. The collages dominate and are very ambitious in their use of the medium but in most cases become a laborious means of achieving the effect of paint. Large areas are painstakingly built from color photos, then scumbled with paint so that a rich surface results, very sumptuous and satisfying, as in Red Sweater, but more often the effect is merely ingenious. The improvised surprises of collage are not used in an important way and appear only as an errant and rather jarring letter or word spliced into an otherwise literal pictorical surface. Miss Higgins has a genuine sensitivity for her subjects and the means as a draughtsman to pull them off charmingly, as in Girl with Rope, a delightful pun on a child by le Douanier Rousseau which combines clear drawing with a fragment of a reproduction. The smaller, less ambitious works seem to give a truer reading of the artist’s abilities because they are less burdened with technique.
––Doug McClellan
