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SURFACE BEAUTY /// Image Journal #36, 2003

The following text was excerpted from the essay "Surface Beauty: Nine Contemporary NYC Artists"-

Kyle Talbott, who is also an abstract painter, presented ‘Shared Form’ a piece that makes reference to his family life but also has wider interpretations. The piece is a diptych, composed of a separately framed iris print and a drawing. The print on the left is a scan of a hospital ID bracelet on which can be read the name ‘Karen Talbott.’ Karen is Kyle’s wife, who recently left the hospital after giving birth to their second child. Two dates written at the bottom of the drawing happen to roughly coincide with the conception of the Talbotts’ first child and the birth of their second, but ‘Shared Form’ does not only commemorate the start of the artist’s family.

In the first part of the piece, Talbott duplicates the medical process of peering within, not with an ultrasound, but with the scanner in his studio. The bracelet doesn’t yield more information than can be seem from its surface, but the drawing in the second panel, on the right elaborates on the first. The uneven circle made by the bracelet is replicated in a pattern of hand drawn circles, connected by a crisscross of diagonal lines. The circles cross the paper like strings of decorative lights or fruits on a branch, looping over each other again and again. Deliberately drawn without precision, the marks look almost like they were made by the left hand, or by a child. But while the drawing may appear childlike, it is not sentimental, and it isn’t imitative of the art of children. Instead, the delicacy of the line and the repetition of the misshapen circles held together by the thinnest of threads is moving. There is a sense of honesty about the overall impression as if the trace of a sincere mark without pretension, even though the paper is small and color minimal, is enough to communicate with the viewer and to begin the viewer/artist dialogue that is essential for appreciating abstract art.

The complete essay, written by Merrily Kerr, is available for purchase online at www.imagejournal.org