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Mark E. Talisman

At Quincy House

By Michael S. Gruen

Mark Talisman '63 is showing both photographs and sculpture executed during the past four years. I am a little disappointed in his choice of works to exhibit as I have seen better pieces of his, yet much of what he shows as most enjoyable.

Preferring color photography, Talisman concentrates on producing tones that integrate a picture as much by color as by subject and composition. Typical, for example, is his photograph of Madrid in which a white sky forms the background to a college of buildings in various shades of brown, with beige highlights where the sun hits directly.

His sculpture, mostly of heads, is generally distended in facial feature and rough in texture. A head of Lincoln carved from a two-by-four has a long, twisted, angry face that tells a great deal about the man. But, as in several of the other sculptures, there is a feeling that the artist's gouges have only cut the surface of his material: the work remains slightly more a two-by-four than a Lincoln. This may be what Talisman seeks but I would prefer to see the human expression less restricted by the material.

The strongest elements in the exhibit are among the photographs, and they, in any case, should be seen.

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