In the early ’80’s, Phyllis Sloane began a unique series of aerial perspective still lives. “ Like most of us, she had been picking up postcards of favorite paintings that she had seen at all the museums she had visited. Unlike any of us, Phyllis Sloane used them as the organizing motifs for homages to her favorite artists…
Homage to Lautrec and Matisse, a 1983 silkscreen, … includes desk calendar pages recognizing her debts to Lautrec’s fresh, calligraphic drawing of intimately posed models and to Matisse’s flattened and patterned figures placed on brightly-colored grounds.
Other artists featured in these obliquely autobiographical watercolors include naive painters Ammi Phillips and John Kane, surrealists Rene Magritte and Georgio DeChirico, late Gothic painters Hans Holbein, Georges de la Tour, and Rogier van der Weyden, and idiosyncratic modernist sculptor Elie Nadleman, whose smoothly rounded forms recall cubist painter Fernand Leger, subject of two different Homages…
… [By 1985] ”Sloane was evolving yet another personal variation on the “overlooked” still life by the time Adieu, Vincent, her avowed farewell to the Homages was being created as both a watercolor and a lithograph… Van Gogh’s portrait of the Arlesian postman, M. Roulin (one of six paintings and drawings done of his good friend in 1888-89) is torn up and scattered across the foreground, symbolically freeing the artist from her obsessive homages…” A number of closely-related, light-keyed still lifes followed, often featuring the trompe l’oeuil treatment of rumpled, eyelet-embroidered cloth seen here.
– H. Daniel Butts III, The Art of Phyllis Sloane, published by OHIO ARTS NOW, Cleveland, OH, 1996
