Allison Stewart is yet another abstract romantic, but her temperament is distinctive. Although she is conceptually allied with Marden and Dunbar— complete with an overmastering theme — she does not share their restraints.
Beset by overbuilding, subsidence and erosion, the Louisiana coastline is disappearing at an alarming rate: a total of more than 900,000 acres has been lost since the 1930s, according to the Louisiana Coastal Area Final Study Report released in November 2004. It was a coincidence, but not a negligible one, that Allison Stewart’s show of new paintings was on view the same month.
ALLISON STEWART This New Orleans artist takes inspiration from the Louisiana wetlands for her graceful ecological works by Elizabeth Dewberry, SOUTHERN ACCENTS Allison Stewart’s transition from a biology major who wanted to create black-and-white drawings for medical textbooks to an expressionist painter whose watery dreamscapes are colorful, vibrant, and anything but sterile is not as…
Symbolically speaking, Stewart, whose exhibit “Crosscurrents” is on display at Arthur Roger Gallery, undoes some of the damage mankind has inflicted on the environment. She begins each of her paintings by wall-papering a large canvas with a layer of architectural plans or oil field maps — things that suggest man’s encroachment on the land.