Mira Cantor has taught color theory, drawing and painting for 40 years, 25 of them as a tenured professor in the Art and Architecture Department at Northeastern University. She has always been driven to learn as well as to teach through her art. Artscope Magazine’s Elizabeth Michelman “Cornered” Cantor in her studio a month before her March 2024 exhibition at Boston’s Kingston Gallery to discuss the paintings and drawings she’d completed during her 2023 sabbatical.
Cantor has spent the last 17 summers in County Clare, western Ireland, teaching an art semester abroad in the village of Ballyvaughan. She paints the world in a studio near the historical and geological refuge of The Burren, on the lip of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the years she has hiked the beaches, caves and riven pavements throughout this upthrust primeval seabed. From the eroding cliffs of its rolling limestone terrain, fossilized sea-creatures drop into the surf like fresh carrion.
Cantor’s broad “seascapes” of oil and acrylic abstract the power and history of this topography. They initially present as diagrams of rock strata replete with the textures and colors of ancient soils and the shapes of extinct life-forms. “Pink Cloud” delivers perspectives near and far in varying sizes and scales. One’s gaze slides across fogs of dull rose and muted teal and drips down through cliff-like layers into beds of murk and muck. The horizontal swathes of “Listen,” alternating slate-blue and ochre, resemble seams of pebbled coal or foamy twilit waves. From the detritus-littered golden strand of “Leftovers 2,” a crab’s-eye-view barely discerns a distant line of breakers, green-topped hills and the tiny, waning sun.
Flickering over these vistas, small streaks and smears of colored pigment are in constant motion. Hot pink squiggles cavort in the puddles, while cones and sliced ovoids ogle from their niches.
Personal boundaries in this arrested time and space grow tenuous. One could dwell forever in the mire of past and present.
Asked how her interests in geology, archaeology and history evolved, Cantor offers an apparent non-sequitur: “Dance.” But as my acquaintance with her work progresses, its appositeness begins to unfold. This early talent and first love, she explains, expanded her exposure to worlds beyond her own narrow Jewish community in the Bronx. As a child, she would accompany her father to work in Harlem, where “people walked the streets and shopped just like I did, but their skin color was darker.” During the summers, she worked her way through college by teaching Latin American dancing in the Catskills. At hotel competitions in Manhattan, she partnered with dancers of all races.