Yvonne van Eijden

Yvonne van Eijden's has titled her solo exhibition at the Weston Gallery, In the Spaces We Talk (on view through March 26). It's a dream-like gathering of perhaps three figures that almost seem to recede from the picture plane as you watch. Looking closer, you discover words written in a hasty, broken script not quite decipherable, like whispers overheard but only partially understood. The word "between" appears more than once, preceded in one place by "the spaces," and both "sound" and what looks to be "imagining" can be made out.

If this seems a remarkably poetic approach to picture making, it's no wonder. Van Eijden is a poet as well as painter and deeply interested in the ways communication happens. Indirection, she thinks, is not to be dismissed, and the spaces -- between words, between people, surrounding creative endeavors -- have their own eloquence.

"I think paintings, and music, are also words," she has said, implying the intrinsic power of these art forms to convey ideas and feelings and also reflecting her own experience as someone who now thinks and speaks in a language she was not born to. The slippery nature of interaction, prone to misunderstanding and wrong interpretation, sharpens this artist's observation.

She works here in a restricted palette of browns and brown-oranges, with a landscape-like background on a big canvas, 5-by-10 feet. Everything is layered, smoky, unstable appearing, with figures suggested rather than delineated. How much of language, one begins to think, is equally layered and unstable? If words only approximate our meanings, how else do we make exchanges? In the spaces, says van Eijden. Watch what happens in the spaces.