The paintings of Valentina DuBasky are ideal slates for working out areas where science and art approach and diverge from one another. In the sensuality and drama of the artist’s paint handling and palette, she seems far removed from the precision and orderliness necessary for the practice of science. Yet a closer look reveals that there is a major mastery here of methods of painting that have been worked out since the Impressionists introduced new ways of representing images and applying paint, what might be called new systems of recognition.
And then there is Dubasky’s manner of dealing with themes and variations – an artistic conceit if there ever was one. In her series of scenes of cranes at various water sources, she often alters just a few details, while leaving others virtually unchanged. From musical composition to poetry to the serial works of Monet and Cezanne, the idea of taking a theme and working subtle variations into it has a serious artistic pedigree. On the other hand, we need only look to Jung and his theory of archetypes, or to the usefulness of control groups in measuring variations in a scientific context, and we begin to see connections between the artistic and scientific deployment of theme and variation.
One thing many artist and scientists share and rely on is the facility for observation, for noting detail and small changes. Earlier generations of artist/naturalists exemplified this bond between art and science. Being a botanist once meant that the scientist and the artist were one, botany basically being the visual description and systematizing of plant phenomena. Valentina Dubasky is not that type of artist/naturalist. She is more interested in the formal, iconic, perhaps archetypal, depiction of animal, bird and plant life. There is, in her work, a deliberate referencing of the earliest known forms of human depiction – cave painting. Perhaps this is a search for a type of artistic essentialism. Unlike those cave painters, though, DuBasky has traveled over continents and observes all kinds of life in geographies and cultures other than her own. Interestingly, when she captures the essence of cranes or, for example, horse- or deerness, the distillation she achieves is not so far removed from the distillations in those essential cave paintings. If she doesn’t represent every detail of anatomy, what she does provide is an uncannily accurate impression, filled with animation and painting life.
Cynthia Nadelman
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