‘Poetic Cartography’

Before digital mapping and GPS, cartography was as much art as Earth science. You don’t need medieval maps illustrated with fanciful beasts to get the point. British Ordnance Survey or French Michelin Guide maps provided gorgeous, detailed and highly informative directions in full color. More so, they excited the imagination not just about a destination, but about the journey itself.

Her show, “Poetic Cartography” at M Stark Gallery April 18-May 31, is an eclectic journey in abstract painting that will excite you about how map patterns can explode into their own world. Her journey from more traditional streetscape patterns to abstraction will show you a new way to experience the spectrum of emotions in pigments.

She started “City of Aleppo” when encountering the Syrian refugee crisis. The map you plainly see is of a Syrian city, Damascus. The rest is purely from Welch’s emotions and imagination. How she envisioned the desperate trek would be for displaced people seeking safety.

In “My Aunties” the map is there too, though less obviously. It’s homage to her mother’s sisters. “Like them, I wanted it to be loud, boisterous and colorful,” she notes. It is indeed.

The title of gentle and beautiful “Autumn Rose Elegy” is derived from a Rumi poem. Ah, Rumi. She relates the colors to the geography she recalls from Newfoundland, one of many life stations moving around the globe with her geophysicist husband.

Welch’s technique involves very mixed media: acrylics, cuttings, ink, plaster, oil stick, photo transfer and a special stage set paint called flashe. These elaborate visually layered creations mirror the process of exploring an idea and a feeling.

“The plaster reminds me of my Sicilian mason grandfather, always coated in dust,” she said.

Welch starts with a concept — a poem, a title, a song, a memory or an incident. Then she lays down a map, sometimes a blown-up photocopy of trees from her New Jersey childhood. Some areas she will overlay with tape, others a resist medium. On top of those she may layer plaster in a special emulsion to keep it flexible, scraping it off in places.  Then many layers of paint after the tape or resist is removed.

Where it all ends up is a multifaceted composite, an abstraction of form and color, yet the bold map lines are always still visible and relatable.

“I’m putting down layers, then excavating layers,” she said.

Alternating planning with improvisation, she calls it, “a conversation with materials.” Though classically trained, her thoughtful, elaborate abstracts have a depth of feeling teased out of her wide-ranging familiarity with many places and materials.

It took her three years to complete “Singing Trees.” Inspired by a line from a poet friend, you can see both the map lines and the underlying photocopy transfer of the trees. A photo won’t do it justice.

She works on four to five paintings at a time, similar color palette, different interpretations. The only small pieces in the show are called “Skin is Regenerative,” another title from a poem about how some wounds never fully heal, a juxtaposition of themes in carefully matching colors with “Aunties.”

“I am motivated to paint healing, and the potential for transformation,” Welch said.

Believe me, you will want to hear her story. There will be an artist talk May 1 at 5 p.m. Ask to see her sketchbooks, another set of intriguing artworks.

Grab your map and find your way to Half Moon Bay for her show. Artist reception, April 19, from 1-4 p.m., M Stark Gallery, 727 Main St., Half Moon Bay, (415) 407-8743, mstarkgallery.com.

Bart Charlow, author, artist and consultant blends over 45 years of painting and photography with narrative storytelling. Explore the intersection of observation and expression through his insights on the local art scene, find his books at bartcharlow.com and his art at bartsart.weebly.com.