By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic

I first saw Elizabeth Ockwell’s watercolors of European buildings 20 years ago in an exhibition that brought together interior and exterior views the artist encountered in Rome, Paris and Dresden. Now her first solo exhibition at the ArchiTech Gallery is a tour de force devoted not only to a single city but also one building: the Palais Garnier in Paris.

Ockwell is not an architect, so the images of this 19th Century opera house – indeed, all buildings – are less renderings than evocations. Her opulent Palais Garnier therefore has been conditioned by art of that time, say, bejeweled watercolors by Gustave Moreau, but expressed by Ockwell in a personal style that balances crisp, firmly defined passages with almost improvisatory sections of wiry doodling.

She begins work at the site, drawing in pencil often rudimentarily and using watercolor only sparingly. On this drawing she typically records comments made to her while working, but they drop out of the images she transfers to larger sheets once she gets back to her apartment. These more finished pieces generally have a great deal of watercolor, all contributing to the animation and conviction of the scene though, as in the instance of the Palais Garnier’s grand staircase, it is personal and fanciful, not literal.

Those who know the building will have the sense of it being reinterpreted for them at the same time that those who do not will receive what feels like an on-the-spot transcription. Whichever, Ockwell has captured the spirit of the place to perfection, through images so exuberantly self-sufficient that one scarcely notices they all are unpeopled.

[Published January 26, 2007]