The Boston Globe

07/01/98
Bold DeCordova Annual

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Thomas Halloran, trained both as a classical musician and a visual artist, has been fascinated by Beethoven's Death Mask for nearly a decade. His "Beethoven Death Mask Variation" paintings are as tumultuous and heroic as the composers music. He has blown up the craggy features so they're cut off by the edges of the canvas, even though those canvases are 7 or 8 feet high. Using materials including ash and marble dust as well as paint, he creates crusty, dripping surfaces that look like frescos crumbling after a flood. But the composers features endure. Stonelike, they suggest a topographical map; as art, they're closer to sculpture, to the faces of Mount Rushmore or Rodin's 'Balzac,' than they are to paintings.