#figurativepainting – Articultures

Allow Nothing to Worry You: Inez Storer and Andrew Romanoff at Gallery 16

Allow Nothing to Worry You

The recent exhibition at Gallery 16 in SF of work by Inez Storer and her late husband Andrew Romanoff presented a touching and bittersweet journey through time and place. Titled Allow Nothing to Worry You, the show pairs Storer’s unique brand of Magic Realism with Romanoff’s quirky and whimsical works.

A larger-than-life photograph of the pair greets viewers upon arrival, a mural-sized enlargement of a scene at the couple’s bucolic home in Inverness. Romanoff, a dashing figure in a striped shirt and ascot, is on the right, while Storer, an intense and vibrant figure on the left crackles with energy. But the punctuation point is where there hands are gently joined in a tender clasp.

Storer is the more sophisticated artist of the pair. Her formal art education included studies at Art Center Los Angeles, San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, Dominican University, and SF State, where she obtained her master’s degree. She taught art at SFAI for many years, as well as at Sonoma State, SF State, College of Marin, and numerous other colleges and art schools. She also ran the Lester Gallery in Inverness, while teaching and raising a blended family of six kids.

Allow Nothing to Worry You Installation Shot all photos courtesy Gallery 16

Storer’s work pairs an unerring eye for color and composition with a wicked sense of humor, filtered through a lens of social and political conscience. Drawing strongly on narratives inspired by found objects, iconic subject matter often includes romantic female imagery, Matisse-inspired flowers and still life objects, references to world politics, and environmental issues. With such a busy life and household, the fluidity of the collage medium enabled Storer to create her art when the opportunity presented itself.

Romanoff’s personal history has a strong intersection with that of modern civilization, as great nephew of Tsar Nicholas II, deposed and executed by Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, one might say in his case “the personal is political” is proven true in spades. He grew up in Great Britain, on the grounds of Windsor Castle, in a place with the beguiling name of “Frogmore.” While not allowed to consort with the royals, they did occasionally bump into each other in the garden. After serving in the British Navy in WWII, as a young man, Romanoff moved to the States at the encouragement of his cousin, he subsequently had to learn to fend for himself using his wits and his strength to get by.

Andrew Romanoff, New Boy at School, Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 5.5″ x 6.75”

Inez and Andrew met and fell in love, introduced by the cousin, Igor, who lived in West Marin, and the rest is history. They raised a large blended family in Inverness. Andrew discovered his own artistic talents, and became focused on the medium of Shrinky Dinks®, a children’s craft material that reduces in size when baked in the toaster oven, one which seemed somehow well-suited to convey his unique memories and impressions of the world around him. The company provided him with a lifetime supply. (More information on Andrew’s life and work is found on this site at Remembering Andrew Romanoff.)

Inez Storer, *Telepathy*, 2023, Mixed media on panel , 24” x 36”

Storer had grown up in Los Angeles, with her father, who worked in the film industry, offering her a look at the backlot and underbelly of the glittering fantasies of the silver screen. Forties era films, with their glamorous women, suave men, and convoluted plots, inflect much of the aesthetic of the work. Her multi-faceted dad was also a pilot, and his international adventures add another layer of complexity to the work. Even more significant was Storer’s discovery, as an adult, that she was not, in fact, Catholic, as she had been led to believe. During a time when it was dangerous to admit, her family had hidden its Jewish faith from even its own members.

Inez Storer, *The Ordinary Life of Natalia Ortiz*, 2010, Oil paint and collage on panel 52” × 40”

The Ordinary Life of Natalia Ortiz (2010) makes a statement about the lives of all women, how behind the calm facade of a “normal” woman’s life there are always buried secrets, hidden intrigues, loves lost or found. A box of letters, purloined from her neighbor’s garage, set the stage for a narrative about one of these clandestine affairs, their flowing script sets up a lovely collage element on the lower edge of the canvas. A beautiful, mysterious woman stands in for Natalia, while her elusive suitor emerges from the upper edge of the canvas. A bit of detective work yields the result that a woman named Natalia Ortiz was, in fact, a 40s-era film star from Mexico.

Andrew Romanoff, *A Day at the Races*, 2004, Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 9.5” x 9.5”

A Day at the Races (2004) suggests one of Romanoff’s iconic scenes from childhood. Here, a young lad in a stroller implores his father to push him faster, echoing the racetrack scene behind him. Scenes from Andrew’s own childhood, many included in the book The Boy Who Would be Tsar, published by Gallery 16 in 2006, have a particular poignancy that is well-suited to his chosen medium of Shrinky Dinks®. In other images, like 9 Second Limit No-Ogling Law (1995), the childlike drawing in juxtaposition with a mature theme feels more loaded; as Storer remarked, “Andrew had no filters.”

Andrew Romanoff, *No Ogling*, 1995 Acrylic paint and pen on polystyrene mounted to spray painted panel, 10.5” x 10.5”

The mingling of romance, intrigue, royalty, Hollywood movies, Pop art, and naive art blend and intermix to create a fantastic world of illusion firmly grounded in reality and personal narrative. Like many great celebrity pairs, say Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, the duo brought out the best in each other; obviously Storer, a strong-minded woman, is no femme fatale, and Romanoff, who worked as a laborer and craftsperson much of his life, had a nuanced presentation. But, yes, he exuded a royal presence, and the pair together created a gestalt of grit and grace that was unstoppable. It seems as if their symbiosis shifted back and forth as needed, with one providing a rudder of stability when the other began to veer off course.

While Romanoff’s work remained largely a hidden talent outside of the Bay Area, Storer’s work has been widely acclaimed. They enjoyed traveling, in particular making several memorable trips to Russia, where Andrew was greeted by many as the sole surviving heir to the monarchy traveling incognito. Storer completed a remarkable series after one trip, conflating experiences of the thin veneer of normalcy and elegance being at the time displayed in certain settings—the Russian palaces they toured—and her early assimilation of the concept that the glamour of Hollywood was really all just paste.

Gallery 16’s presentation is a welcome tribute to the amazing lives and work of these two remarkable individuals. Romanoff passed away in 2021 at the age of 98, but Storer remains vibrant and active to this day. At Storer’s talk with Griff Williams near the end of the exhibition’s run, she commented that it was good Andrew had not lived to see Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, while the pair both feared such an eventual outcome, it would have made it no easier to take. With dry humor and unfailing deftness, each in their own way has made an indelible mark on the Bay Area art scene.

Barbara Morris

Allow Nothing to Worry You closed in May at Gallery 16, SF.

https://gallery16.com/

Inez Storer, *Fear*, 1992 Oil on panel 18.25” x 15.75”

Devorah Jacoby: Inside Out at Seager/Gray

Painter Devorah Jacoby has always presented a complex internal world in her works. Coming to her career in art after a practice in psychotherapy, she is familiar with the intricacies of the mind and the dances we perform in response to our emotions and surroundings. In her latest body of work Inside Out, currently on view at Seager Gray Gallery, this world is inhabited primarily by women—women often lost in thought, submerged in a landscape that at times obscures or threatens to engulf them.

Jacoby’s surfaces are juicy, her command of oil paint is deft and joyous—here expressing a surprising and at times flamboyant melding of styles from pointillism to realism to splatters, knife painting, and even occasionally including some glitter. Outside (2022) features a woman in a full, swirling green skirt. Eyes closed, she is in and of nature. The upper half of the canvas is scraped and scumbled, scratched and marked with orange drips and a periwinkle blue outline, like a butterfly. Here, as elsewhere, a pattern of rectangular blocks of color suggests a broad pointillist stroke as well as a bit of the geometrical abstract passages in Gustave Klimt.

With the subtext of the pandemic shutdown and how all our lives were upended as a kind of undergirding principle, Jacoby’s tense, often dysfunctional or emotionally-fraught human dynamics have let up a bit in most of these works, as if finding relief from the challenges of daily life in painting the beauty of nature tipped the scales away from too much psychological tension. The artist spent time in Wyoming during shelter-in-place, and found abundant inspiration in the landscape. Jacoby uses gardens, plants, and in particular flowers to repeatedly draw the eye, and cause it to linger, in moments of pure pleasure.

*I Can Feel Your Heart Beating* oil on panel 12″ x 12″ 2022

Appearing in two versions, I Can Feel Your Heart Beating (2022) evokes some of the darker regions of Jacoby’s world, as an introspective young girl holds a disembodied heart in front of her white jumper. The words evoke a sweet moment of lovers, perhaps, in close embrace, while the more clinical vision presented suggests an opposite reading, something rent asunder, death, disease, or perhaps love gone bad. We may also recall the iconic works of Frida Kahlo, where externalized organs symbolize the physical and emotion pain which that artist endured.

Reading (2022) is an excuse for more juicy brushwork, an explosion of pattern including folds of creamy tones marked with yellow and orange splotches, a profusion of wild daisies forming a dense blanket in the foreground. Two parted feet and ankles draw the viewer inward, to an ambiguously rendered interior space. A blurry red form, the book, dissolves into a blotchy sky of blue and pink. The absence of a head or upper body offers a bit of a shock, and can be read a humorous, or disquieting, or both.

*Fruits de Terre* acrylic and oil on canvas 36″ x 60″ 2022

Fruits de Terre (2022) is the star of the exhibition. A red room houses woman clutching a Toy Poodle, the scene conveying a European Modernist vibe echoing Matisse and Manet. A red vase, patterned with the recurring rectangular color blocks, holds assorted flowers in warm hues, an array of food, salads, strawberry shortcake, even crustaceans, creating a tour de force of color and texture. Adding to the visual texture are charcoal lines delineating a cake and various cooking implements.

Lilypad (2022), a mid-sized vertical work, is mysterious, dark in hue and subject matter. A female form is splayed out across a horse. A bright red pattern wraps her body, reading alternately as fabric marked by pattern, or more disturbingly, as blood. Rough green circles, the pads of the title, fill the lower portion of the canvas. The woman’s leg and foot hang limply along those of the horse, one may well wonder exactly what kind of nocturnal ride has just transpired.

*Flowers All Year* oil on canvas 60″ x 48″ 2016-2022

In Flowers All Year (2016-2022) it is interesting to explore how the bouquet dissolves into geometry and gesture simultaneously, as does a woman’s face on its right, her right eye obscured by a giant orange rose. This bounty of flowers, a recurring device in the show, thus becomes a bit menacing, is this a surfeit of pleasure?

Horizon (2022) forces the issue of the figure’s immersion in the paint, bringing the rectangular marks front and center, a small nude seen from the rear appears as if in an attempt to pry them apart and enter the space. Starfish (2022), a dreamy exploration of every shade of blue, features a tiny form of the sea creature alongside a girl in a red bathing suit, a foil to all the cool hues. This work is one of the most successful in allowing the viewer to become vicariously immersed in the beauty and tranquility of nature.

Jacoby is a gifted painter, her skillful mix of generous swaths of seductive color and creamy paint entice the viewer into a space where the mental world intersects with the visual, introspection meshed with observation. Yet here, in this body of work, the figures appear strikingly and unmistakably alone, the only narrative one we may construct as to how and why they are isolated. Certainly an apt device for a dark time of social distancing, yet Jacoby’s disarming use of the power of nature to soothe and delight us ultimately puts a surprisingly positive spin on a time that has been anything but.

Barbara Morris