Bromfield Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston
November 4 through 28
“As parents are tempted to do, I wanted to know more about my kid,” said Arch, a painting teacher and education director of the Arlington Center for the Arts. “I thought maybe there was a clue in there about his turbulent teenage years. I didn’t find any writing, only pages and pages of these doodles.”
Ah, but what doodles.
She took pages of her son’s doodles and copied them onto transparencies, and projected them onto a wall to see the shapes in different scales. “The originals were done in pencil in tiny eighth and quarter-inch doodles,” Arch said. “Blown up, they’re of such fine quality. I wanted to see what they would look like at 1000 percent. They are beautiful, geometric and algebraic.”
Arch traces and paints the “glyphs” over what are mainly acrylic silk-screened backgrounds on wood and paper. “The shapes are faithful to the original, albeit in much greater form,” she said. “I just place them where I place them and change the color.” One of the works has been transcribed into a 10-foot high scroll and more recently, she’s been turning them into sculpture.
“The shapes seemed to represent a secret, indecipherable
language,” Arch wrote in the show’s introduction. “I realized
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