AQUEOUS WORLDS OF WONDER

by Sam Hunter
Professor Emeritus, Art History, Princeton University,
Critic and Historian of Modern and Contemporary Art

In Nancy Staub Laughlin’s shimmering, reflective universe all is bright beauty, ease and joyous color. Bare branches emerge through a haze of fluffy white flakes in A Confetti of Snow, more densely than the veil of blossoms in the earlier, more verdant Hint of Gingham. Rounded conifers cast soft yet assertive shadows on green lawns that magically appear to stretch into mysterious distances and beguiling vistas in the springtime study, while feathery flakes cloak details in the illusionistic snow scene.          
         In the forefront of Hint of Gingham, as if laid on a picnic table, are gently contoured ornamental fruits – a glowing lemon and large, ripe berry, sugary with the glitter sprinkled over stippled surface as if in echo of the inherent “gingham” effect lend by the backdrop’s budding branches. In Ms. Laughlin’s newer snow-confetti landscape, glowing beads drape over glazed branches and, enigmatically, across images that jut up against the picture plane like photos taped to a picture window.
         Beneath the still-life in Hint of Gingham, crystal cubes appear to float in water whose lavender ripples repeat the forms and cool hues of the berry, fabric and hazy sky, as they do more massively and forcefully
in another recent painting, Glow of the Prisms.

And around each submerged, crystalline form, shimmering in glassy environments, the vibrations become visible as translucent concentric circles radiating outward from each poised and centered image, or reflected against curling,
icy tendrils.
         A similar projective sense captivates the viewer, as
if he or she were drifting off into a dream state, or diving below the reflecting surface and suddenly and unpre-
dictably reappearing above it, or even sideway to it. Indeed, the elusive, empowering surface becomes an everyday mirror of life, as we peer in amazement at the essential underpinnings that characterize her latest works. The overlapping planes in The Confetti of Snow, like the lacy patterns that lie behind and gleam through the strangely substantial forms dominating Glow of the Prisms, extend and amplify the visual resonances and implications of her earlier works.
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