Page 45 - Studio International - March 1966

Lynn Foulkes The Canyon 1964 Oil on canvas 65 x 107 in.
One of the pictures in The Photographic Image Collection : Rolf Nelson, Los Angeles

John Ferren returned from the Middle East with a
strong modification of his style. His new paintings at the
Rose Fried Gallery are ordered far more stringently, with
brushwork giving way to sharp contours and curvilinear
shapes giving way to the straight line.
Yet the elements of the past are there : the almost
centred mandala, brilliant in colour and illusionistically
anchored in depth ; the tendency to symmetry ; and the
idiosyncratic colouring (pinks that are Ferren's very own,
for instance.)
I was taken with these paintings, particularly those in
which the central figure was warped into depth purely
by means of high-keyed colour, but puzzled by the
seemingly gratuitous designs that work their way up
and down in vertical bars to one side of the mandala.
The profusion of detail distracts from the essentially
hieratic quality of his image. q

Left
Theodoros Stamos
Hagia Zoni Sun Box (Holy Belt) 1965
Oil on canvas 25 x 68 in.
Right
John Ferren
Painting
Oil on canvas