Showtime

What: Abstractions

Who: Yolanda Varga Davis, Rome Matikonyte, Tadek Sobierajski

Where: Sunrise Gallery, 765 Beach Blvd.

When: until Aug. 3

Phone: 905-549-5888

Hours: 1 to 5 Thursday to Sunday

She signs her paintings "Csibi," Hungarian for "little chick," but there's nothing meek or immature about her work. Yolanda Varga Davis's abstracts are big and bold and a feather in the Sunrise Gallery's cap.

The gallery is featuring paintings by Varga Davis along with works by Rome Matikonyte and Tadek Sobierajski. The three local artists share Eastern European roots and an attraction to abstraction.

Varga Davis, who was born in Hungary and came to Canada in the 1950s, is a pianist and choir director as well as a painter. She's worked as a draftsperson and designer, and she began her artistic career by drawing and painting in a lifelike style. She was especially drawn to the human figure, which she liked to depict using India ink.

After her husband died about five years ago, her struggle with grief led her to embrace abstraction.

"I let the brush go. I painted day and night," she says, "and then I found I really liked it."

She also took whole-heartedly to acrylic paint, finding that its quick-drying properties complemented her spontaneous and impulsive painting process. And acrylic's bright colours served as an antidote to sorrow.

In Secret Garden, she begins with a garden landscape but reduces the elements to their vibrant essentials.

A rickety white fence boldly cuts the composition diagonally into two uneven parts.

The wooden fence's straight lines and its whiteness contrast strongly with the rest of the garden, where red poppies grow in profusion. The rounded, uneven shapes of the blooms blur and blend into one another. They look as though they were rubbed, splashed and dragged, drawing attention to the painting process.

Varga Davis juxtaposes red with green and white. Red next to green enables each colour to shimmer. The white patches contribute extra brightness.

A more symbolic image dominates God Speaks, another acrylic piece. Varga Davis fills the centre with a highly animated arrangement. Thick and thin black, orange and white lines gather into a loose oval that seems ready to burst and take over the rest of the composition. A pale greyish area surrounds the central motif, providing a bit of soothing space.

Phrases in English, French, Hungarian, Latin and Greek float around the centre.

In the 20th century, artists often introduced words and phrases into their paintings to add extra shapes and lines that enliven the composition.

Some words helped to reveal the meaning of the image, and that happens here.

This painting includes the sentence, "I am who I am," which is spoken by God to Moses in the Old Testament (Exodus 3:14). This is when God speaks to Moses from a burning bush.

Knowing this, we might see the burning bush in the painting.

Depicting the deity as a collection of lines is in keeping with traditional images of God in ancient Jewish and Christian art.

God was deemed too holy to be represented in human form, so artists devised more abstract images.

It's not surprising that the artist for whom words are important also has a special signature, a nickname that has been hers since childhood.

Regina Haggo, a former professor of art history at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com