BRATTLEBORO
The mysticism of Dana Wigdor’s paintings is captivating. At first glance, the five pieces on display at Café Beyond capture a disquieting strangeness with their lack of color and mysterious mechanical flying figures. Yet each depicts the reality of human emotion.

The supernatural world has always fascinated Wigdor. She has been working passionately on these five expressive pieces for the past year.

“I’m interested in creating a world with a different gravity and behavior of light,” she said. Most notable about her work are the extraordinary characters Wigdor affectionately calls “my people.”

Mystical and obscure, her work is emotionally absorbing, conveying an alternate world that redefines the laws of light and gravity.

“This is a world where a beam of light cast on the snow can behave like a stone dropping into a pool of water, its unexpected weight producing ring-like waves orbiting outward, then echoing into the distance. These are places whose weightless inhabitants are either engrossed in each other’s presence, or they are inextricably alone, dwarfed by the largeness of the colorless nostalgic landscape.”

It is through these tiny and detailed flying machines, surrounded by a colorless, romantic landscape, that Wigdor captures human emotion.

“I’m depicting human feelings through natural landscapes and these mechanical inventions,” Wigdor explains. “My work captures relationships and emotion without using human existence.”

While “doodling” the flying machines, Wigdor said, she finds that they evolve into their own unique design: “a kind of dictation from my unconscious,” she said.

Wigdor loves the varied responses she receives about these “anthropomorphic flying machines.”

“People say ‘It’s a baby sleeping,’ or ‘Oh, sports equipment’ or ‘a UFO!’ and I just love how people can see such different things,” she said.

Though Wigdor’s paintings convey a colorless landscape, it alone is not their subject. Her work integrates the romantic, brooding landscape as a “cerebral expression of feeling” and the gravity-defying design of her mechanical inventions.

Each of the five oil-on-canvas paintings has a one-word title, each representing one emotion; “Us,” “Lost,” ”Home,” ”Jealousy” and “Found.”

Surrounded by the passion of her subject matter, Wigdor said she was distracted by the use of color. For the past three years, Wigdor has essentially given up color – restricting herself to tubes of blue, white and orange paint – after she found the decisions of color were blocking her ability to develop her expression.

In addition to the large paintings, Wigdor chose to share two groups of arranged tiny sketches and cut-outs (one even graced with color) as a “documentary board.” By contributing the sketches she hopes to show how she created her mechanical figures and to exhibit the small scale in which she works.

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Wigdor has always known of her passion for art. Working on a small scale is natural for her. At the San Francisco Art Institute, where Wigdor received her bachelor’s degree in 1990, “the school encouraged us to work very large,” Wigdor explains. Consequently, Wigdor first began sketching the miniature figures and mechanical flying machines the week of her graduation date.

“This imagery just burst out of me” she said “ and I really found my true self.”

Aside from her paintings, Wigdor is also an art teacher. For a number of years she taught figure drawing and abstract painting to adults an senior citizens. “I’m interested in the experience of being an adult beginner,” Wigdor explains. She plans to further develop similar workshops in southern Vermont.

Wigdor lives in Brattleboro with her husband and is enjoying some time off from painting. She not only looks forward to getting back to her art in April, but also welcoming back the use of color.

Wigdor’s show is displayed at the Café Beyond and runs through April 30.

Leigh Mary Watson is a freelance writer who lives in West Townshend.