PAINTING
Here is work that is accessible without being simple. I find a kindred spirit in her comment that the are no shortcuts to quality. That there must be, as she writes, "a center of interest that pulls it all together, balancing a force that pulls it all apart". Allen never lets you rest. And who would want to rest? Her spread is wide. Her journals and sketchbooks are filled with acute observations and wonder. Moving from Vermeer's moment that captures and then freezes time, she leaps forward 300 years in that same world and ponders on why it was that the Nazis forbid the artists to paint. A good point. Clearly there is more here than meets the eye. For one thing the expression of the human potential was something the Nazis did not want.
Edward T. Hall, Owings-Dewey catalogue, 1995
Edward T. Hall is an internationally known anthropologist and author, specializing in intercultural communication.
- The accomplished art of Page Allen, a spiritual descendant of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and other early American modernists, blends visual epiphany with archetypal psychology. Working intuitively and unselfconsciously in oil, watercolor and monotype, she transforms visual clichés to reveal her psyche and spiritual longings. Her work, like those of her mentors, is stunning.
Sally Eauclaire, ARTnews, March 1994
Page Allen's art is firmly centered in the tradition of ... early American modernists. Since pompous exagerrations of scale- in art, inspiritual aspiration, and in the way that nature is regarded- are now characteristic of our culture, she has chosen her ancestors with particular care. Her art provides a useful, as well as an inspiring, model of how we might respond to the natural world. While her work is certainly rhapsodic, for example, it never seems to depend upon overselling or exaggeration. There is an undercurrent of melancholy that gives measure to her rhapsody.
Mark Stevens
Mark Stevens writes for Vanity Fair, New York Magazine and is the author, with Annalyn Swan, of De Kooning, a Biography.
STUDIO NOTES
- I must have been thinking of O Keeffe, because I drove up to Ghost Ranch one day. Like many, I simply looked around and began to walk. Finally I sat down to eat my lunch and discovered that my hard-boiled egg was less than hard. Dismayed, I stared at the soft yolk- and then at the earth pigments all around me. Slowly I began to mix them in my palm- ochre, violet, dark red- and the golden yolk. Slowly I smeared the paste on my face. Seeking an initiation that would join me to this place and even transform me, this seemed a clumsy gesture, and yet it was eloquent. Marking my face committed me in the most basic way to the sight and insight of becoming an artist. It also joined me to the land with a touch as tender and as primitive as making love.
When I returned to New York, my work changed. I drew on sheets of paper that seemed to me like rock surfaces, or like skins stretched on my loft walls. I was more aware of the power in making a mark. I drew with pastels that remembered their earth pigment nature. The shapes I drew were organic and geologic, as though I were exploring valleys, dry river beds, hills, feeling the imagined topography under my smudged fingers.
Page Allen, We Came to Santa Fe, Pennywhistle Press, 2008
- Even now, when man's place within nature is so compromised and dishonorable, and nature itself so damaged, I feel fortunate that life and desire have led me to a place where beauty persists, splendid and effortless, and where my imagination can meet it without equivocation.
Page Allen, The Eiteljorg Invitational 2, New Art of the West; The Artist's Response to Nature, catalogue, 1991