Timeline is a vivid stunner

I tried really hard to come up with a catchy lead for this article, but I just couldn't. You see, there is no clever, oblique way to say it. So I'll just be direct: Nancy Linden is a phenomenal artist and you would be remiss to let her current show close without a visit.

Linden's latest work, Timeline, now on display at Resurgam gallery, is a complex, yet accessible visual display full of thick, gorgeous lines and rich, vivid colors. The expert craftsmanship that is on display makes the exhibit a joy to behold, but there is a heavy weight to the show as well, making "Timeline" the truly whole and rounded creation that it is.

In her artist's statement, Linden ruminates on the way time works. Sparked by her mother's Alzheimer flashbacks and a theory of time that posits that "time is not linear, but particulate, crystalline: that viewed from outside, time would appear not as an irreversible river in which the only reality is the present moment and one can only move forward from here, but as a structure in which all time is simultaneously present, like a dense crystal," Linden got to work and the result is an amazing display of drawing, painting and installation.

The show is split into two main rooms. The first room is occupied by an impressive installation that seems so natural to the space that it looks like it grew right up out of the gallery's hardwood floors. Metal cables form a twisting frame from which wire and found pieces of jagged plate glass hang suspended. Thick rope, faded wood, twine and chicken wire complicate the web and the words of poems written on transparent Plexiglas float in the air. On the walls hang huge, wall sized portraits done in thick, black charcoal on sheets of roll paper, occasionally overlapped in a patchwork and casually tacked up with silver thumbtacks.

Linden's draughtsmanship is remarkable. Her strong, decisive lines are full of confidence and they bring her subjects to life. One of her untitled drawings in this first room depicts five older women in housedresses and open toed shoes standing in a row in an open field. There is a very snapshot like quality to the composition, as if they are being remembered in a flashback of the mind's eye."

Another significant choice of subject matter in this half of the exhibit is a series of charcoal drawings of mummies. They are hauntingly drawn, their knobby arms crossed over their middles seem to be clutching their stomachs in pain and their decayed faces seem to be frozen in perpetual screams of horror. They are, Linden says, "Memories in flesh: perfect in the sense of completion, a life encompassed.

It is this sense that the images on the walls are all physical incarnations of memories and images made vivid and alive again; the exhibit produces a sense of enchantment and makes you feel like you're not so much looking at drawings, but traveling back through time.

When you step into the second room, you leave the black and white behind and you enter a world of color. Linden's portrait paintings in this room jump to life, the same bold, outlines of her drawings providing their strong skeletons and her generous paintbrush layering on their meat and muscle.

One standout painting entitled, "Plainswoman", is done in a combination of oils and oil crayon. It depicts a female figure facing toward the left, her silhouette ringed in red oil crayon that forms a kind of glowing halo around her as if she is being illuminated by the rays of a blazing sun setting somewhere out of view. It is the big thick marks of the crayon that give the painting a very tactile, luscious quality and make the canvas jump off the wall.

In fact, red seems to be Linden's secret ingredient in this particular show. There is an element of it found in nearly every canvas -- in a chair, a hat, a skirt, a shirt, a pair of lips and sometimes hidden in the background where you'd least expect it. Every painting but one is touched by a trace of the bold color, a technique that works extremely well to inject warmth and vitality into the women and men who inhabit them.

A series of three close-up portraits also caught my attention. Entitled, "Banjo Man," "Cowboy," and "Cigarette," the trio stands out because of their rough-hewn quality. Sand is mixed into the thickly stippled paint used on these canvases, which gives them a very gritty texture befitting of their subjects; hard scrabble working-class men whose weathered faces and scraggly mustaches immediately convey world-weary, salt-of-the earth personalities. In "Cigarette," there is a trace of red so subtle, yet so jarring that it looks like someone scrawled a tube of lipstick across the canvas in an act of defiance.

Linden is the kind of artist that is so talented, she compelled even a poor college student like me -- with nearly no money budgeted for original works of art -- to take a second glance at her price list. Take your own gander at her work. I promise, even if you can barely afford the luxury of your daily cup of coffee, you'll want to own a Nancy Linden too.