toni_littlejohn
Toni Littlejohn

When asked how children could be made smarter, Albert Einstein answered, “Read them fairy tales. And if you want them to be even smarter, read them more fairy tales.” 

The fairy tale’s absence of boundaries and linear time is vivified in Toni Littlejohn’s exhibit, “The Paint of Paint,” at Toby’s Gallery through Jan. 31. Here Littlejohn explores a world that dispenses with boundaries, where time feels eternal and where one’s imagination moves between the earth’s surface and its fomenting interior. It is as if she is the obedient palette-conduit for the earth’s geological memories and current dynamics.

In the main gallery hang large paintings that depict the incomprehensible and transcendent force of the earth’s energies. Splashes of paint are arrested in their dispersal or erupt, swerving magisterially in sublime grandeur. We seem to witness scenes from the planet’s formation a billion years ago, the molten forces at its core surging in gorgeous colors that roil and boil, shimmer, glow, pause and flow into its present manifestation. This sensual, erotic vibrancy of the earth evokes awe: we see the Dionysian upwelling of irrepressible life, the fiery blood and tumultuous pulse of Gaia.

The smaller, vertically hung rectangular paintings on the southern wall of the main gallery suggest the early appearances of humans. Reading these paintings from left to right gives the impression of mankind’s poetic evolution—hesitant, tentative, doubtful. This evolution reaches apotheosis in the painting, “Swimming in the Milky Way,” in which universal soul mingles with the cosmos. “Thaw,” a close-up of small, splintering ice as it catches yellow sun and blue water connects thematically with the double rows of small square paintings in the gallery wing. These seem to illustrate in miniature the earth’s appearance at different times of day and seasons. Again, through various densities of colors, the images shape concentrated impressions of seasons, their moods and temperatures. “Spring Scintillation” is a feast of gorgeous golden green; “Within the Night,” with its rosy orange and dark, vegetative central form, captures an image of nature’s ceaseless energies.

It is, indeed, painful to leave this exhibit. We might all prefer to stay immersed in the comfort of gazing into a starry sky, where boundaries have not formed and time is not linear.

 

Toni Littlejohn’s “The Paint of Paint” is on display at Toby’s Gallery in Point Reyes Station through Jan. 31. The gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

 

Julia Hawkins wrote for the Light as Julia Fries in the 1970s, when she lived in Inverness. A freelance theater critic and novelist, she now lives in Cotati.