Carl Little – Gail Page: Light and Energy

Last September, I drove to Sedgwick to meet Brooksville-based artist Gail Page at the Reversing Falls Sanctuary. Page was showing abstract paintings, aesthetically miles away from her wonderfully whimsical and celebrated images of dogs, cats, and other creatures. The meeting room, home to The Gallery Within as well as a gathering spot for AA meetings, yoga lessons, and other community activities, seemed to give off extra light and energy from the large well-lit canvases that circled the space.

The light in Page’s paintings represents an energy she associates with connecting to the spirit or life force “that remains a mystery but is ever so present.” This light can be felt as a feeling of calm, connection, and “a sense of feeling grounded yet unburdened,” she writes, “and it enables you to exhale, let go, and create.”

Page practices Reiki, a mode of therapy based on an ancient Japanese system of enhancing healing energy through hovering hands over the ailing. Among other benefits, she considers Reiki to be one of many tools that help “cultivate light.”

While her history with Reiki has been “casual and intermittent,” Page has witnessed positive results firsthand. So it made sense, when starting a new series of paintings, that she would incorporate its symbols and practice in preparing her canvases, paints, brushes, and herself in order to be “more in sync and open to whatever was going to happen.”

Page painted her first large abstracts in 2005, wanting to take herself out of her comfort zone, namely, the small works she had been showing. The first ones, colorful, bright, and bold, featured geometric shapes and lines that “related to one another but kept their individuality.”

By contrast, in her new abstracts, Page lets the elements “converge, collide, and join together to become an energetic force.” The paintings emerged over time, sometimes taking months. She developed them instinctively, in what she describes as a conversation of symbols, marks, and swipes of colors. Lots of layering takes place.

The paintings seem to be infused with light, with a ground of white coming through in many of them. In Calling the Light, the eye moves among areas of soft hues, led by freeform linear marks. A similar arrangement occurs in Where It All Started but with a more centralized source of energy. Spinning marks create additional dynamism.

At times, Page will add a bold stroke, as in He Wanted More Green, where a strong dash of red crosses the canvas toward the bottom like a horizon line between the animated areas above and below. The title adds an emotional note—the acknowledgment of a demand.

Infinity, the first in the series, is supercharged. Page relates the painting’s action to the “busy, frantic energy” of her experiences in fifth grade, a curious personal source.

Page admires Ethiopian American painter Julie Mehretu for pushing the limits of size while keeping the space alive “with consistent energy and emotion.” She also looks back to the work of Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky, embracing the former’s spontaneity and the latter’s playful shapes and lines. She adheres to Kandinsky’s theory that each color has its own vibration, which can evoke an emotion and thereby elicit a therapeutic response from the viewer. “Just like music,” she writes, “a painting has a rhythm that can resonate and heal.”

What most impresses Page about these painters is their willingness “to step out of the norm.” She has always thought it was important for one’s inner well-being to find its own expression and style, “but it takes courage,” she writes, adding, “You risk vulnerability.”

Page believes there is power in everything, “animate” and “inanimate.” To find this spirit requires awareness. “To see,” she writes, “we need light and, lucky for us, light comes to us in many ways,” including art.