Rebekah Callaghan | Love Notes: 150 Post Street
To watch a painting grow
Rebekah Callaghan’s paintings are cultivated, cared for, and given the space to grow and unfurl over time in her painting studio in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Callaghan made the paintings in this show largely over a period of time when spring turned into summer, when cool, crisp light turned to sweet, saturated humidity. The weather glistened on the old glass window panes, filtering shimmering light over her paintings that rotate, stack, and move about in various configurations on the wall and well-worn studio floor as she works on them. The aging industrial building that inhabits her painting thoughts sits on the city’s edge, between asphalt and overgrowth, an incubator for her work that holds heat and memory. To see each painting evolve is like watching a chrysalis grow into a butterfly - slow and steady progress, nearly unidentifiable daily, but over time, exuberant and celebratory in its reveal.
When I look at Callaghan’s paintings, I think of how much she loves Bonnard. I think about the meditative time it takes to wash pigment out of big, absorbent paint brushes, and I think about the sweat that probably falls down her cheek in the height of summer. I think about how special and rare it is, these days, to lose track of time in the lull of summer timelessness and warmth of a sunset studio glow. The color of her warm, daytime paintings like Pearly Afternoon shimmer with the wind, as if someone has just moved past them, a breeze in their wake. Her cooler paintings, Blue Morning or Dwelling Place, have a stillness, like the click of a light switch turning off as evening eyelids become heavy, or the morning quiet before a house awakens with
percolating coffee dripping.
The tonal color in the paintings, often built around nearly monochrome palettes with brilliant punctuating pops of pigment, emphasize the edges, where forms push up against each other, like leaves reaching for sunlight. Our bodies meet some of these paintings, like Hearable Hum, immersed, calling to a history of women making oversized paintings beyond their wingspan, like Joan Mitchell or Lee Krasner, inspired by landscape, light, and the natural environment. Other more intimate paintings in the show, such as Brassy Sun, assume the dimensions akin to a portrait, a deep mirror-like space, refracting experience and light through soft, scrubby touch and astute linear delineations. The shapes in her paintings are evocative of vines or leaves, sometimes outstretched, sometimes entwined securely, where their edges meet and their depths dissolve.
To spend real time with a painting is to seemingly watch it change, but really, the change is within us. To be open to change is to be open to truth…and the inevitable. Nurturing change, as Callaghan does in her densely layered and sensitively constructed paintings, is a risk worth taking in celebration of belief. Her paintings are each a love note to the future.
Kati Gegenheimer, artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA
