Sponsored by the Department of Recreation, a small, stellar art exhibition of works by resident Tom Wallace is at the Glen Ridge train station, at Ridgewood and Bloomfield avenues, until the end of next month.
There are 15 works in the show, mostly tapestries, but also oil paintings and collage. Wallace, 85, a retired Ridgewood School District art teacher, created many of the pieces more than 60 years ago.
Looking at the textiles, it is hard to imagine anyone outside a medieval monastery who would attempt this labor-intensive work. Consequently, anyone seeing them is certain to walk away with an appreciation for anyone who endeavors to take up the loom.
There is one tapestry, “Dozen Patches,” that stitches together 12 pieces of cloth. That seems simple enough, but simple is never easy, certainly not here. The patches were not random bits of salvaged material, but individually weaved by Wallace on a small loom the size children employed to make potholders once upon a time. Joining the patches is stitchery using black strings of various thicknesses, unexpectedly providing a sensation of depth meandering over the surface of the cloth like an oil spill.
In a nearby tapestry, “Free Form Shapes,” a subtle interplay of light and dark is woven into a small area. The effect is something akin to sharkskin cloth fabric — cue the suits of the Frank Sinatra’s early ‘60s Rat Pack. Certainly only a coincidence, both materials are from the same cultural era. Nonetheless, the effect provides the hanging with a feeling of depth.
How interesting and mysterious it is when a viewer, confronted with abstract textiles or for that matter abstract paintings, finds a primordial need to create a feeling of space in the changes of color, texture and line.
Another hanging, “Free Form Shapes,” uses yarn of natural sheep wool obtained from Prince Edward Island purposely for this piece which took months to complete.
Wallace worked on different tapestries on two looms, one at his family residence in Ridgewood and one in Montclair, as a student at Montclair State Teachers College.
“Swirls” is a tapestry of regularly spaced vertical warping with the horizontal woofing changing. In a departure from abstracts, the pictorial “Rooster” is made of wool and cotton yarn of various weights with golden threads whimsically showing the fighting cock’s spurs. All these works should be viewed with a careful eye.
At the current show, a viewer will have the opportunity to examine the warp, the up and down stringing the weaver establishes in their initial structure through which the horizontal woof is weaved.
Trees play a predominant role in the paintings exhibited, but they are unlike those in most other paintings. Wallace’s trees are a little sinister. They are strange and expressive, even purgatorial, in a way reminiscent of Charles Burchfield (1893-1967).
“Autumn” is an oil on masonite painting, from 1963. The lone, leafless, grasping tree is confined to a skinny composition measuring approximately 30” by 6”. It is a brushy picture with either the sun or the moon at the top of the composition. Wallace’s aim is never reality.
“Forsythia,” from 1961, is the largest painting in the show. It is an oil of two identical plants separated by a dead, leafless tree. The plants themselves are in full flower, the nearer rendered in a thick impasto, the other in small dots or pointillism. The difference between the techniques provides a sense of space. The unnatural tree separating them looks like a cutout, only enhancing what might be the memory of a dreadful authority.
“Before Montclair State Tree,” done in 1961 while Wallace was still in school, is a leafless limb, something which, from a distance, might look prehistoric or close-up like something in a petri dish.
There is also an interesting collage of a cat in the show. It is two pictures of a feline sliced into strips and glued to the ribs of an accordion-like construction. From one angle, looking across the ribs, you see one cat; from the other end you see the other cat.
It would make an interesting piece in a restaurant where there is a lot of foot traffic, but to his credit, Wallace made only one of these collages. Regardless, this show is worth your time. Opening night is Saturday, Aug. 3, from 5 to 7 p.m.
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