Thursday, Jan. 13, 2005 | 8:32 a.m.
After years of showing mostly in science museums and selling in commercial galleries , Austine Wood Comarow is delighted to see her artwork hanging at the Las Vegas Art Museum. When looking over her list of past exhibits, itUs easy to understand why.
For more than 20 years Comarow has been popular at science and nature centers, as well as commercial properties and public spaces from France to Boston to New Mexico. But the nature of her work makes it a difficult pitch to art museums. To grasp what Comarow has created, one needs to stand before it, beside it or slowly move past it.
There is nothing static about her work. In her illuminated collages, colors morph into other colors, hues change, images disappear, then re-appear.
While the subject matter within each piece changes, the context does not. That the viewers need be present among her originals, she said, is not so bad.
"What I like about it is that this work is not reproducible in any way, shape or form," said Comarow (pronounced "comma-roe"), whose work is on display through March 13 at the museum.
"Photography does not do it any justice at all. It makes it very special to see an original. In the 1500s, the only way to see an image would be to go see an original. That's so foreign to us. We think that just because we've seen a reproduction of a painting, we've seen the painting."
Though Comarow, 62, refers to her work as paintings and herself as a painter, she uses no oils or acrylics or watercolors and there is no pigment in the materials used. The meticulously crafted works are created from spliced clear cellulose sheets that are formed into images and set between two polarizing filters.
When light shines through, colors break into their own and create the images.
"It all has to do with the way light is being bent," Comarow said, looking through a filter that allows a viewer to manipulate the process of color change.
"The thickness controls hue. Angle controls value and intensity of color. There's so many subtle differences in color."
"Spring Rain" (1994), a circular piece, features two humans who morph into tulips that morph into a Greek column. Continuously.
"Venus," a Botticelli-inspired piece, shows from one angle a female jogger wearing a visor and workout clothes -- a "modern conception of Venus," Comarow said. "She's fit. She works out."
From another angle, the portrait is of a floral 15th-century Venus in flowing garb.
"Flags of September" (2003) is a 9/11 remembrance in which a father and child are featured in silhouette. The scene morphs into a more colorful portrait of the street in which they live. Flags are abundant amid the house fronts. Lush greenery is accompanied by Halloween and harvest symbols.
The piece "10,000 Years" features a man (her husband) sitting at the computer. The picture morphs into cave paintings. The frame, covered with pebbles and other mixed media, creates a cave effect.
Some images in the exhibit require that you view them through a polarized sheet hanging before them.
Other works have motors and change by themselves -- a better sell for galleries because the only required interaction is to watch.
The space not highlighted by the polarized sheet remains a pale textured surface.
"We don't have to see color every minute of the day," Comarow said, referring to the more interactive pieces. "Just like you don't have to be exorbitantly happy every minute of the day. It makes it more interesting when you contrast moods."
Inventing a medium
Comarow has been creating what she calls "polages" since 1967. She learned the process from a friend who was a physicist. It was a way for her to escape the pressure put on students then to study abstract expressionism, which was at the forefront while she was in college.
While she enjoyed abstract expressionism, Comarow said, "That's something that you could come to after a profound acquaintance with realism ... I wanted to understand the conventions of art. To do realistic painting, you were automatically labeled as a Sunday painter."
With an accomplished eye for realism, Comarow was seeking alternate materials to create mixed mediums -- a practice she learned from her mother, who taught her that art can be made from anything.
Biology and other sciences influence her subject matter.
The rest of her influences came from her father, a quaker pacifist who served three years doing alternate service (as a subject for medical experiments) during World War II and later worked for the United Nations, bringing his family to Geneva, Switzerland, where Comarow was raised and attended school among a "community of diplomats, artists and scientists."
She later attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Indiana University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University. Her first major art show was in 1973 at the Museo de Belles Artes in Santiago, Chile.
Polage portfolio
Wearing polarized glasses, Comarow creates the work on a light table and sways her head to see the changing colors.
She uses a razor knife and it could take three months to complete a larger, more detailed piece. Large-scale pieces require extra hands. A 25-foot-by-27-foot work at the Boston Museum of Science in Boston tells the story of communication from cavemen to astronauts in outer space.
A 64-foot-long piece, titled "Labyrinthe de Lumiere," was installed temporarily in 1989 at La Cite des Science et de l'Industrie in France to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution. It comprises 16 4-by-4-foot panels.
The exhibit at the Las Vegas Art Museum tracks the evolution of her work from her first effort in the 1960s, titled "Tourists," made from Scotch tape, candy wrappers and rubber cement, to recent works.
"Primavera," an homage to early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, is a portrait of a beautiful pale-skinned woman with flowers in her long golden locks and tiny flowers dotting her collar. The woman's skin color, eyes, hair and the mood of the piece change according to light and angle.
Regarding the detailed "Primavera," Comarow said, "I wanted to do that to make the point that I'm really all about painting."
Comarow's love for nature and science is seen in her 1990 piece "Leaf Woman and Man," where the Earth, clouds, bricks and mountainous horizon provide the backdrop for a man and woman.
"The woman is the organic, rooted to the earth, sort of nurturing," Comarow said. "The man is the one that builds. Together their job is to preserve the earth."
Her most political piece is her 1987 "Third World Dream," which features a small boy who morphs into a guerilla soldier with intermittent flashes of a soccer ball, a television and an automobile, items commonly found in industrial countries.
Pointing to the boy, who is crouching, Comarow said, "If he doesn't get those things, if we don't share, he's going to grow up to be this guy, the guerilla soldier."
One end of the gallery features her more organically themed and motorized works where branches, leaves, butterflies, flora, lizards, stones, birds, water and landscape dominate the subject matter.
It's these motorized, floral works by Comarow that are popular in commercial galleries.
"My struggle is to try to get people to accept the more innovative ones," she said, referring to such pieces as "Primavera" and a 2004 polage called "Canopy," which appears at first to be a minimalist piece of 16 evenly cut textured panels, but through the polarized filter shows an abstract tree against a rich, blue background. Its leaves morph from green to more pale, subtle colors.
"So many people like motorized," Comarow said. "I'm moving towards more interactive.
"I want it to be a secret to be revealed."
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