Mixed media landscapes, and sculptures and prints by West Coast artists are shown in this little downstairs gallery which has recently expanded to include a penthouse sculpture garden.
Miss Dicker is an expert craftsman and a diligent researcher, more interested at the moment in textural effects than in subject matter. Using landscape as a point of departure, she abstracts such popular themes as forest glades and lonely waterfronts, shrouding them in luminous pearly grays and eerie night purples. In open light and full color, her works become decorative and harsh. Her strongest point at the moment is her surface treatment. She builds up a low relief of collage and underpainting, lays over it a skin of rice paper tightly concreted down with resinoid glue, then glazes, splatters, hatches and scumbles to develop the subject. She lists her materials as tempera, casein, polymer with tempera, oil wax, drawing inks, layers of rice papers, wood veneers and burlap.
The sculptors, all widely exhibited, show medium to small works on the 5th floor sculpture garden, and among the printmakers, John Ihle stands out.
—E. M. Polley
