he setting is a metaphor spoken in terms of color by a patient muse. Lee Deffebach’s works grace the Phillips Gallery again this year. Deffebach will turn 75 soon and her artwork emanates her commitment to nonrepresentational colorful creation.

I imagine Deffebach as always awake and working even when she is dreaming, constantly motivated to fold colors and move shapes to their most tenacious powerful position. Her color palette references dawn and the paradoxically burnt fertile landscape of the desert at 5 p.m. and the smallest turn in a piece of decaying metal. Dark browns lazily hold the bright light-blues where the snapping red and alert orange wait.

Deffebach knows the weights of her colors and possesses a full understanding of composing color into form through the softest variations in her brush work. What appears to be a solid blanket of color is actually a difficult-to-create work that highlights the path of paint set in motion with precise but barely visible light texture. The paintings are exceptionally flat works. The paint exudes a powerful sense of mixing and mingling, but maintains an extremely two-dimensional look, typical of Helen Frankenthaler’s better-known works.

Deffebach paints because she loves paint. She paints with acrylic, watercolor, oil and ink with brushes, squeegees, rollers and whatever else she finds useful.

The exhibit features large-scale paintings, some of which are larger than 60 by 60 inches. These pieces consume the viewer, they become the new landscape. She creates space that goes beyond the ubiquitous standard and would ordinarily be overlooked. In the face of her saturated, nonrepresentational work, a person has to come to the present and reference the surrounding that they may have forgotten to look at. For Deffenbach, this is life. Possibly every setting she stands in front of, grand or ordinary, inspires her.

“My paintings solve no problem, they make no statement, there is no intrusion by them on the viewer. I work with color, shape and line until I find the painting comfortable to look on, to muse upon. Relationships if color, shapes and edges as a celebration of the momentary ordering of the unknown,” Deffebach wrote in her artist statement.

Her smaller paintings on exhibit demonstrate a knowledge of composition. Her larger works suck the viewer in, but pieces like “Monday Morning” (12 by 10 inches) are more about technical observation. They seem to speak the reasonability of the way Deffebach builds her colors, shapes and edges.

Deffebach’s sculptures are made out of litter she finds from her yearly retreat to Tscarora, Nev., an old mining town now mostly abandoned. She puts her findings together and paints them much like a joyful child would play with an erector set. The titles of her works are whimsically odd at times. Names like “Good Hat” describe a welded pile of old tin cans with an orange metal mass on the top. Many nonrepresentational artists do not title their work. Deffebach holds titling parties, which may explain the freshness of her interesting titles.

“Many artists have jobs on the side. Not Deffebach, she has always been true to her art,” said Meri Decaria, director and curator at Phillips Gallery.

Because of the poor newsprint quality, inability to print in color and the obvious lack of the real thing found in this lame magazine, I advise you to go stand in front of her works, which will be on display at the Phillips Gallery until July 11. Deffebach’s passion translates to the viewer. Its practical honesty frees viewers from their mundane lives and gives them the eyes needed to experience art in our routinized existence.
stephanie@red-mag.com