REVIEWS OF MARLO'S WORK:
"Winged Woman"
Marlo's art isn't about birds. Each artwork reflects the image of the bird. Her life is filled with birds. She loves and cares for many birds, but the bird is a symbol. The truth behind Marlo's fascination with the bird is her adoration of freedom, of play, of lightness and ascension. Each of Marlo's birds is a portrait of the artist as a winged woman - the archetypal form of human liberation. The bird is the Holy Spirit and Marlo's artwork reflects that ancient Christian symbol of the Divine Mother - the spirit of us all -- as a perfect expression of The Feminine. The symbol of the bird is the conceptual structure of all her artwork, but those avian qualities occur in the act of painting. As she paints or fabricates objects, there is a clearly distinct and deeply intuitive sense of material - of paint, of color, of surface, of feather or gilt. Marlo sometimes works with found natural materials in which she finds material connection to the spiritual. The act of painting is made sacred for Marlo by the invocation of the bird spirit. In the act of painting she becomes Apsara - the winged bringer of truth and wisdom. The shamanic dimension of Marlo's artwork is her ability to transform herself into the other - the bird. In the world of time and space this transformation is merely poetic, but in the deeper worlds of spirit and magic from which her work emanates, the transformation is actual. It enables Marlo the shaman-artist to bring us wisdom and beauty. Each of Marlo's artworks is a gift - a blessing from the Divine spirit which is given with compassion and love. As objects the works carry with them a spiritual power which lives in tandem with their elegant beauty and suggestion of grace and freedom. These gifts exist in each brushstroke, each elegant line or bold flash of color. The presence of the bird-form is an omni-present reminder in the artwork's ability to connect each of us to our own potential for freedom and grace. The gifts of the Winged Woman are wisdom, beauty and grace. Marlo offers these things as a painted prayer and a visual invocation.
Michael Grady Chair - Department of Arts and Consciousness John F. Kennedy University August, 2009 ---------------------------------------------------
Review by: Art Busse, Architect of Cambio, Lyric Design, 2009. ( www.artbusse.com )
"Marlo's paintings populated my house over the year or so that I had Cambio on the market. I say populated because her works have a depth of presence that made me feel as if I were sharing the house with them the way one would share it with an interesting but enigmatic stranger whose history could only be guessed at by staring harder at the fragments of her past that had found their way into the present.
They were suggestive, these paintings, elusive, opulent and layered but in the way that veils are layered, showing only enough to make what was beyond all more compelling. So I was called down in over and over again, through the greens and blues, past the shimmering golds and silvers, beckoned by the ghostly figures of birds to some other place and time with its own meanings bounded only by the limits of my own imaginings. There were nights alone in the dark house when I would take in these paintings, spot lit on the wall, and feel that I was looking through a window into my own subconscious. Other nights it felt like leafing through someone elses family album where the images were faded and blurred by time, dust and water. They seemed to be Victorian at times, with dark secrets below their formal posturings, but always perfectly natural, never having to insist on their right to be there with me.
They are gone now, as so much is, but their shadows and echos remain, emerging from my mind like a house through the forested fog, to haunt me in my stillness."
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