The name of the just retired, long-time University of South Florida art professor Mernet Larsen is synonymous with painting, quality, intelligence, meticulousness, honesty, scholarship and artistic inquisitiveness. After joining the university in 1967, Larsen became a revered teacher in the best sense of the word, winning USF's coveted Outstanding Teacher award in 1985. She taught at Yale and participated in summer programs in Rome and Paris. She was also visiting artist at numerous colleges, including the Nanjing (China) School of Art. Over the years, Larsen's paintings evolved as she posed and solved her own intellectual and aesthetic questions. In recent years her forte was a cool, unemotional textured abstraction with linear devices hinting of spatial relationships and hidden memories. Other inquiries involved the visual evidence of structuralism applied onto hints of figuration. Her interest in Bunraku (Japanese theater) and Japanese narrative painting greatly influenced this body of work. More recently, the Larsen universe synthesizes all of her intellectual pursuits. Curious narratives are staged with box-like characters filling claustrophobic spaces, responding mechanically — in motion yet stilled — all at the same time. She condenses time with inventive elongated figures conceived in the 21st century, yet reviving her enduring love for the paintings of early Italian (15th century) Renaissance painter Piero Della Francesca. Considering our ever present thirst for fresh work — a carryover from the 20th century — Larsen's new series, with its inventive visual vocabulary, represents some of the most challenging painting seen in the Bay area during 2003. We blast the really big canons for our Best Painter of the year, Mernet Larsen. We wish her well during her retirement years, and we'll be watching to see where an innate intellectual curiosity and love of painting take this fine artist.
