Los Gatos Weekly-Times

The Edges of Reality

By Bob Aldrich

Paintings by Linda Fillhardt, on view through Feb. 29 in the Los Gatos Town Council chambers, 110 E. Main St., might have something in common with The Twilight Zone.

Exploring "the edges of reality," as she terms the area of her acrylic and graphite-pencil paintings, Fillhardt describes her work as "a spiritual quest for those elements of our reality which exist beneath the surface of our life experience and how they find expression in the physical world."

The 10 works in the current exhibit, the artist says, are psychologically based. "They explore the nature of how we affect the space we occupy. It is about charged energies and the dangers of reality and fantasy, and how they affect space," she says.

By way of example, she points to one of the 10 paintings that pictures a cafe setting with a photograph of a person on a table, a cup of coffee left behind and a shadow, sort of a "ghost" of the person who was just there.

"Our presence affects space, and sometimes people do seem to leave a residue of themselves behind," she says.

But don't look for Rod Serling to emerge from the sometimes mysterious background of one of her colorful, somewhat ambiguous paintings.

"My work," Fillhardt says, "is about that ambiguous place where the edges of reality and fantasy exist together. It is about the space where feelings, impressions and impulses exist in a sometimes safe, sometimes threatening way."

Fillhardt, a graphic artist in Los Gatos for 15 years, grew up on a farm near Marysville. "I'm a fourth-generation Californian," she says. "I was always interested in architecture and design in high school, but did not really become interested in art until I took art classes at San Jose State [University]."

Fillhardt, who owns Fillhardt Design, 409 Alberto Way, Suite 1, graduated in 1971 with a degree in art. Although she occasionally makes use of models, most of her work springs from imagination, she says.

She is currently studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. She studied with Barbara Clark of Palo Alto and with Eileen Hill at Mission College. She has exhibited in numerous shows and galleries, including a 1993 Juried Group Show at Montalvo and the 1995 Juried Group Spring Show at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Fellowship Gallery at Los Gatos United Methodist Church and shows in Santa Crúz, France, Mexico and Spain.