Commentary
Powerful and physically dynamic, the horses that Bing (Marian Bingham) paints are at the same time tender and approachable beings. Whether galloping or at rest, they seem to welcome our intimate response. These horses will admit human visitors into their herd and will gently carry a sleeping rider in the moonlight.
For these are no ordinary animals; they are dream horses. They are massive, mythic beings, who appear somehow ephemeral. They seem to emerge from the atmosphere, and at times are capable of flight. Their human companions do not hold the reins, but give themselves over to something beyond their control.
Bing has created a vision of the nightmare, that haunting psychic presence of Romantic art, as a beneficent familiar, who will take us where, in waking life, we might not have the courage to go. It is a place where nature and natural feeling holds sway. The textured surfaces of the paintings, with their subtle oil glazes, make tactile the images of weather and landscape. The dream horses take us to where both animal and viewer become one with rain, and snow, and sun. It is a place where the rawness of nature has somehow becomes magical and refreshing. We have left the world of village houses and hilltops and entered a realm of pure feeling', where color, rather than a descriptive quality, has become an emotive force.
The imaginal locale where Bing takes us is full of enchantment, but springs to life from the artist's encounters with the observable world. The paintings evince her intimate knowledge of both the muscles and the moods of horses. The grasses, trees, and fields in these paintings are those that the artist has known, and transformed.
Bing has drawn upon the tradition of Chinese brush painting for its capacity to abstractly suggest form, feeling, and space with a delicate economy of means. But the specific evocation of yearning and freedom in these paintings is distinctly her own. She has created visual poems of the inner life given full expression in the body. The living world is seen as a home, and our animal and human natures have at last made peace. in the place that she has shown us, we are exposed as if in a dream, but we are safe even as we ride bareback through the snowy night.
– John Mendelsohn
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