By CHRISTINE TEMIN
The Boston Globe, 4/21/93
"Environment: New Work," Starr Gallery, Jewish Community Center, Newton, MA
Brackett's paintings and drawings are obsessive and exquisitely rendered views of trees -- trunks,
branches and roots - gnarled and twisting. The black and white drawings are the simplest. One
depicts a Japanese maple, its branches in white silhouetted against the darkness. The tendrils of a
"weeping Beech" really do look like streaming tears. The paintings are more complex, and here
Brackett offers art-whithin-art, painting images of rectangles on the larger rectangle of the picture
itself. Both feature images of trees, and to heighten the dizzying effect of image-on-image, Brackett
combines black and white images with trees in color, and trees from the tropics with those of New
England's frostier clime. She also uses a worm's eye perspective that gives the sense of trees
towering over the viewer. In "Rupture" a black and white view of a tree is superimposed on a vividly
colored one, and across the monochromatic tree falls a lyrical ribbon of purple. The colored version is
lush, heated, aggressive; the version in grissaile sinks inward. Brackett makes you see what color
does to the world, and what color does to you emotionally.
©Christine Temin 1993