Review

by Mario E. Castillo

Michele Tuohey has an earnest and tenacious approach to painting as an intrinsic fundamental principle for communicating one's awareness of the self and the social context as they transcend normal reality.

Her impressive and inventive body of work is reflective of the psyche and commands your attention in a strong and philosophical way.  The skillful rendering of the human figure serves as a counterpoint and as a foundation to the electric brilliance of the texturally and coloristically charged surface done in "broken" color dashes of hypnotic luminosity which pattern the mind, evoking a heightened state of physiological phenomena imprinted on the retina of a metaphysical third eye found in another dimensions.

The scale of her work is ambitious and one feels an intense passion for the process of artistic creation.  Her compositions are bold and uncomplicated so as to communicate the humble solitude of the self.  The pictorial space is controlled so as to be almost inconsequential to the gestalt found within the figures.  Tuohey's paintings are materializations of hidden truths which touch our sensibilities when we view them and challenge us to a new art experience and a new understanding of who we are.

Mario E. Castillo is a Professor of Art at Columbia College