Vibrant sun-drenched colors envelope viewers in Connie Connally's work, Coastlines, on view at Craighead Green Gallery through February 14.

Connally recently relocated from Dallas to Santa Barbara, California and this is her first work to come out of that move. She has taken to the West Coast with great brio. Not only has the work changed in response to the environment, but elements of her new topography have also given her a new vocabulary that evokes the feeling of the ocean air as well as the physical shape of the land. As a plein air painter, California also provides her with the temperate climate that not only allows her to spend long periods of time drawing out of doors, but has also given her a broad new range of subject matter.

Color is the primary vehicle that creates strong horizontal planes in some of the work and skyward thrusts in others. This color energy pushes beyond the edges of the canvases, towards infinity.

One of the most striking color contrasts between California and North Texas is seen in the light and sky. According to Connally, "moisture in the air (in California) leads to saturation in color". The intensity of these colors envelopes the viewer as much as the air it depicts. This color shift illustrates one of the most dramatic changes in Connally's work. While yellows remains predominant in her palette, the vermillion reds and rosy pinks of earlier work has been replaced by water inspired blues and fog drenched whites.

While color provides the initial appeal, it is the inner dimensionality that ultimately fills the canvas and the surrounding space. Her move to a coastal city intuitively inspired her to draw the water, especially since it was water that served as her portal into abstraction. And as she looked around, she realized that her new landscape is more vertical. The daughter of a pilot, she "loves the idea of things flying". And fly they do. Birds of paradise, Dragon trees and Skybirds soar against the rich blue backgrounds, creating a dynamic energy.

The fog-inspired paintings, on the other hand, balance the color saturation seen in the flora-inspired work. Soon after arriving in California, she noted that when the marine fog rolls in, it desaturates everything. The usual brightness is dulled to gray. On these days, she only uses gray pastels in her drawings. It is only when they are transferred to canvases and rendered in paint that Connally injects them with her own color sense. The strong influence Joan Mitchell's work can be seen here. In 2002, Connally saw a Mitchell retrospective in New York and the effect that it had are her can still be seen in the grisaille works, particularly in the similarity of Mitchell's push and pull colors. Connally also makes allusions to Mitchell's expressionism, particularly in the drawing "Biltmore Lines".

Her diffused focal points also create a vibrant tension. The center of energy is not always in the center of the canvas but often swirls outward to the sides. The "struggle(s) with chaos versus structure" is another challenge for Connally. While nature can appear chaotic, there is an underlying structure to it. In her work, there is a sense of anarchy with the profusion of line and color. But there is also framework. It demands a closer look to get a feeling of the most ethereal elements of the natural world.

Connally is also adamant in her mark making. As a painting instructor she encouraged her students to vary their marks, from the long and fluid to short brushstrokes. The use of varying lines helps create the shimmering effect in these paintings. In the fog-inspired work, long brushstrokes emphasize the horizontal and vertical while shorter, rounder strokes create throbbing blips on the canvas. In the more floral themed work, the variety of marks replicates the sense of wind wafting through the landscape.

Another characteristic of Connally's work, automatic writing, may be a by-product of Mitchell's influence. Just as the Abstract Expressionists of the 20th century relied on the collective unconscious, here Connally alludes to the natural world without directly depicting it. We feel surrounded by the fog in the grisaille work and the warmth of the sun in the floral pieces.

According to gallerist Kenneth Craighead, Connally paints to her surroundings, which is evident in the work she has created over the last few years. Since she paints out of doors, Connally is inspired by her travels. A trip to Cinque Terre, Italy represents a dialogue with the aqua "Bay of Poets" and the hills of the Italian Riviera. And the golden light of the Veneto suffuses the work Connally created while in Venice. More than that, however, the Italian work shows the link between Connally's figurative work and abstraction, which she came to midway into her career.

For many years, she worked as a portrait painter. Her sitters were often placed against indeterminate spaces, which were abstractions unto themselves. In 2002, while in graduate school at Southern Methodist University, she participated in the SMU-in-Taos program and traveled to Fort Burgwin, New Mexico. A professor there challenged her to try a completely new direction while in this different environment. In trying to chart that new course, she says, she sat alone in a field for a month. A chance encounter with a local woman changed her work and her life. The woman invited Connally to her ranch to paint. While visiting the ranch, Connally came upon a water lily pond, with a pink barn reflected in it. This outing provided the spark that gave Connally the new focus she sought. With this and the influence of the Joan Mitchell exhibition, a fresh path was forged.

In the earliest of these works, she let go of the figure and allowed the abstraction, long the background in her portraits, to come to the fore. Her new series is the latest after years of experimentation in different locales and with different visual resources. The first painting completed in the latest body of work, "Grasping Summer", reflects her early encounter with the water lily. It is horizontal. It is almost representational. It exudes a sense of flora. The last work done in the series, "Dragon in my Yard", is the full realization of the California landscape, with its spiky dynamism against an aqua colored background.

Her success in balancing the abstract with the non-objective is a hallmark of her success as a painter. She maintains the essence of form, be it with birds and gondolas in the earlier work or flowers and trees in the current work. At the same time, she keeps the rest of the canvas alive either through color or lack thereof. To that end, the constant movement of water and air shimmers throughout her work. Just as nature never stops moving, Connally has managed to capture that kinetic energy. But she is never constrained by nature. Some of her plein-air paintings are direct observations while others are abstractions.

Her comfort in this new idiom dovetailed with the move to California. It also required a shift in her choice of materials. She typically made oil sketches while painting out of doors. But the intensity of color in her new surroundings demanded a material that could match this rich concentration. Connally quickly realized that she would have to switch to pastels, which could most closely replicate such extreme saturation. Ironically, as she prepared to leave Dallas, she pared down as much as she could and in so doing, gave away all of her pastels. With her newly acquired, replenished set of supplies, she began making her drawings with this innately linear material. Using solid lines, without smudging or blurring, helps capture nature's movements.

Perhaps because they are created out of doors, the drawings have a freedom to them that often translates into greater structure in the paintings. While not on display, the Gallery has a number of these preparatory drawings, which are unique works of art on their own. They are available for viewing and it is worthwhile to take time to compare the two as they demonstrate Connally's creative journey and her complete facility in both her use of media and organization of space.

They also play off each other. The interplay between negative and positive space is a result of the translation from small works on paper to larger painted canvases. Amid the bright passages of color, there are open spaces which not only allow the viewer to breath but also provide breathe for the paintings themselves. For Connally, these white spaces pay homage to the paper on which she creates her drawings. For the viewer, they provide playful gaps in the landscape.

In addition to a new beginning, new locations often allow for a change in visual perception. That is certainly the case for Connally who says that the move to Santa Barbara "gave me the freedom to look at things in my own way". She feels that her new surroundings have also allowed her to make up a new language and set new rules with new parameters. She feels that there is intensity in both the sky and intensity in shapes.

So what is next for Connie Connally? She says she still has more to discover in Santa Barbara as well as in the rest of California. As a personal challenge, she will try to paint a little smaller. She wants to see things in a microcosm. In so doing she plans to work in pencil and graphite, in black and white, to "get to the core". Will she tackle the ocean? She says she has only painted up to the shoreline because, "the ocean is so big". In her gifted hands, its essence should be condensed, energetically rendered first on paper and then on canvas and relocated, within the near future, to landlocked North Texas.

Copyright 2009, Nancy Cohen Israel