The Beauty of Solo Voice in the Art of Elizabeth Colomba

I first became acquainted with the paintings of Elizabeth Colomba on a summer trip this year to the Princeton University Art Museum. My original intent was to see the Frank Stella Exhibition of his monumental prints from the late 1980's and 90's. The Stellas were stunning and almost overwhelming in their exuberant complexities. I found that in room after flashy room, though, my appreciation was bothered just a bit by a little thought creeping in to the back of my mind...this is what a man can do with a healthy supply of cash, a team of technicians and the accolades of a supportive art world. The thought did not color my view exactly - these works were masterpieces. The notion simply provoked a yearning for something quieter and more intimate, a solo voice to sound against the backdrop of the great orchestra.

I found what I was looking for in the exhibition, Revealing Interiors, that the Princeton University Art Museum displayed on two modest walls in an adjacent gallery. Revealing Interiors featured mostly small works on paper on the subject of single figures in intimate spaces. I had just finished my own illustrated poetry book on that very subject a few months previously so the display felt like a kindness to my soul. Notable in this small grouping were two works of WPA artists Minetta Good and Dox Thrash, both working in the late 1930's to 1940's. Good portrays herself working in her studio and Thrash lovingly depicts a woman preparing for a Saturday night party. These prints and drawings flanked a small watercolor by the artist Elizabeth Colomba. To my delight I noticed by the date on the painting that she was a contemporary artist.

The watercolor painting by Elizabeth Colomba was entitled "Clytie." The painting was rich in narrative content and allusive subjects. Sunflowers rested in a classically decorated vase. A fireplace mantel was lovingly decorated with a detailed frieze of grotesques that cavorted above a relief sculpture of Apollo in his chariot. Above the mantel was a painting of the lower half of the the god Appollo with his lyre. Clytie here is depicted as a woman of color, to overlay another dimension to the classic tale of the sea-nymph of the same name that appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the original tale, Clytie is spurned by Apollo, wastes away and is transformed in to a heliotrope, or sunflower.


"Clytie" like many other paintings by Elizabeth Colomba, is an ekphrastic masterpiece. The image rested in my smart phone gallery for a time when I would be so bold as to contact the artist via her web site to find out more about her work. I was graciously helped by Ms. Colomba’s curator, Monique Long, who gave me detailed explanations of the iconography in the figurative paintings that filled the website, which I have linked to below.

My first impression of Elizabeth Colomba’s oil paintings was how technically proficient they were. Ms. Colomba received training in classical oil painting at the Estienne School of Art and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in the early 1990's. This was a time when figurative art had still not made its resurgence in popularity that we are just beginning to experience today, and it demonstrates a certain pluckiness to say the least for the artist to persist in a medium and a subject that might not lead to deserving accolades. But persist she did, creating an oeuvre of impeccably crafted works of art.

Looking at Elizabeth Colomba’s paintings, what is immediately obvious is the mastery of a style of painting closely tied to classic masters such as Vermeer. Without knowing, one would think that many of them were indeed newly discovered Vermeers or another heretofore unknown Dutch master. Some might consider painting in this way somewhat anachronistic. Yet there is purpose in making use of these old materials and old techniques. For Colomba, it would seem to be a way of completing an untold, or perhaps under told story, fittingly described in her own narrative as a "reappropriation."

In the painting 1492, for instance, there is a reckoning of what has become in popular folklore, a date of discovery and adventure. As a bicultural artist, Caribbean and French, Elizabeth Colomba brings to bear in this sumptuous work a duality that is painful to recognize. There is the spilled sugar, whipping a hurricane like fury through the atmosphere of the painting. Clearly this is a destructive disruption that will leave its mark upon generation upon generation - as depicted in the stain on the woman’s otherwise beautiful blue dress.

Other paintings seem to exist just for the sheer joy of celebrating all that is beautiful about the female presence in a world resplendent with wondrous things. It is difficult to tear oneself away, for instance, from a lavish golden still life that seems the stuff of dreams. These dreams may carry a hint of the nightmarish, yet the overall truth revealed is that the sublime and the frightening often do exist in tandem.

Links:
https://www.elizabeth-colomba.com/
http://www.efanyc.org/artist-news/2018/7/11/samira-abbassy-elizabeth-colomba-noel-anderson
http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/