Lily Stockman's Covey
Lily Stockman’s strikingly simple geometric abstractions at Gavlak gallery possess a mysterious confidence. Her softly curved lozenges, U-shapes and circles, rendered in a mostly muted palette of grays, yellows and pinks, refer to 1970s feminist abstraction, but also feel strangely unique.
But nothing comes from nowhere, and Stockman’s paintings were inspired by filmmaker Derek Jarman’s famous sustainable garden in Britain. Stockman’s vocabulary of shapes could be flower beds or abstracted body parts, or even a rudimentary alphabet. They suggest a correspondence between landscape and body in which it is hard to tease out which is which. In this sense they embody Jarman’s philosophy of gardening with, not in spite of, thenatural terrain.