Bernice Montgomery exhibits works from two series, City of Refuge and Homecoming. Both derive from lived experience, City of Refuge from that of the artist, Homecoming from the remembered experiences of the artist's mother. Together, the two series mark the poles of urban and rural life.
The paintings from the Homecoming series, Summer Time and Sunday School, evoke the childhood memories of the artist's mother of the twin centers of rural life: church and schoolhouse. Placing these pastoral edifices in the middle distance, their forms cutting the horizon line under a blue sky punctuated with white clouds, distances them in the virtual space of the image correlative with their temporal and psychological distance. Accessible by a dirt road, the buildings are sited at the top of a rise; an uphill walk away. The surfaces of Summer Time and Sunday School are active with scumbled areas of broken color. While the passages of color are abstracted from the particularities of actual local color, they nevertheless remain fundamentally naturalistic in their effect.
The paintings from the City of Refuge series, Da Host, After Rush Hour, Mt. Zion, Da New Jerusalem, and Citi of Refuge II, represent the city as an imperfect utopian refuge. The surface of these works, while active, largely lacks the scumbing of the Homecoming paintings; the paint is more smoothly, though still densely, applied. The forms of the closely spaced buildings are highly active, rhythmically bent and swaying. One is reminded of the Cubist's and Futurist's representations of the city, e.g., Fernand Leger's The City, Aristarkh Lentulof's Moscow, George Grosz' The Street, and Gösta Adrian-Nilsson's The City by the Sea. 1 Except in Da Host, the human inhabitants are not depicted; it is their music-implicit in the rhythmic swaying of the building-which renders the city humane and alive for its unseen inhabitants. Like the placement of architectural structures in Summer Time and Sunday School, the buildings in the City of Refuge series (apart from the aerial view of After Rush Hour) are placed in the middle distance, typically filling the frame though clustered together. Unlike the fundamentally natural color of the Homecoming paintings, the formally predicated, arbitrary color of the buildings in the City of Refuge paintings flattens the individual forms while pushing and pulling the forms spatially relative to each other and against the image plane.
The trope of the virtuous rural life versus the wicked life of the city is ancient. That the reality, as distinguishd from the figure of thought, is more subtle, more complex and far from being so readily reduced to a simplistic dichotomy, would seem obvious enough. Yet it perdures, not always as a nostalgic echo or utopian yearning, and not always without some basis in lived experience. It yet enough pervasive to suggest its subtle operation within these two series of paintings.