Candles, Crosses and Crowns

Friday, April 25, 1997 · ©1997 San Francisco Examiner

“Crowns, Candles, and Crosses,” a show of new paintings by Julie Hodge at TERRAIN, 165 Jessie St., through May 10, is a celebration of oil paint’s sensuous nature. Hodge delights in the degrees of her medium’s fluidity and viscosity, and she plays with its reflectivity by mixing layers of glazing and pigment. For those aesthetes who derive pleasure from oil paint, it will be a real thrill to see, in “Crowns,” a line of creamy white pigment used to define the bottom curve of a crown drip, frozen under layers of dark glazes.

Hodge’s subjects are announced in the show’s title, and candles and crosses are used to emphasize the flatness of the canvas support. The banks of candles out of some dim memory of a pre-Vatican Council Catholic church create patterns that read from a distance as abstractions.

The most seductive paintings are those featuring crowns. Hodge favors a tonality that ranges from deep oxblood brown lightening to burgundy out of which creamy crowns emerge as ghostly relics of the past. Collectively, the paintings create a tone of elegy for a day when religion and monarchy united to form a philosophical and political unity, offering a total belief package to the unwashed and uneducated.