Dream Talk

A Fine Arts graduate of Alfred University Hayley Carrow is a co-owner of “Ró,” a housewares store in the Elmwood Village which, since opening near four years ago, has featured the work of local artists as part of their specialty retail presentation. Now it’s her turn. A Conversation Among Dreamers is a collection of still life and landscape paintings—the best of which fit in well with the muted tone of the surrounding furnishings. Owing much in palette to Italian Modernist Georgio Morandi, the small still life are sturdily brushed in close hues the width of the stroke—evoking architectural volumes representing bottles in shallow space. The landscapes are worked in layers of stained color washes building mass until settling into a loose figure ground relationship. Certain passages suggest the image construction of painter Wayne Thibeau, where an exaggerated perspective falls away from the middle distance of the composition. Dreamers is a good word for these larger paintings—gauzy images in diffusions of color reading like fabric. Carrow piles forms and stacks shapes appearing to want the look of earth-anchored buildings and trees and then letting the paint dissolve into cliff side veils of vacant space. There is assurance and some audacity in the artist stopping where these paintings do. The artist has also hand-painted linen fabric in color washes upholstered on furniture.