Painted from life

[Gulf Coast Museum of Art photos] Memories of Old Havana, mixed media, by the Sculls (Haydee, Sahara and Michael) is part of the folk art exhibit. The Sculls -- twin sisters and one of their sons -- live in Miami and create three-dimensional memory paintings, often using, as they do in this work, people they remember from their childhood.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 26, 2002

Three exhibits at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art feature work spurred by intensely individualistic backgrounds.

LARGO -- An exuberant Cuban artist with surrealist roots, a sculptor who crafts wood into cerebral, abstract forms and a group of untrained outsider artists -- what they all have in common is not immediately clear. But through two new exhibitions and an outdoor installation by these diverse individuals at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art runs a thread of unorthodoxy and iconoclasm in their approach to materials and subject matter.

Drunken Lady in Her Garden, oil on canvas, is a mature work by Marais that brings together the influences of impressionism, surrealism and the magical realism of his Latin American heritage.

"Folk Art from the City of Orlando and the Mennello Museum" and "Tomas Marais: Havana, Paris, Tampa Bay," have different sensibilities. But they work well in the proximity of adjoining galleries, no small accomplishment, since they contain a lot of paintings, prints and sculptures.

Tomas Marais is a familiar name on the local arts scene. Since he settled in Tampa in the late 1980s, his work has appeared in galleries regularly. But this is a comprehensive look at his youthful first efforts in Cuba, his years in Paris and his life here that has the feel of a retrospective, allowing viewers to see themes, preoccupations and stylistic tendencies as they emerge and mature.

From the beginning, Marais' work is marked by bold color and stylized, attenuated forms. Several woodcut prints, among a group of 35 Marais pieces donated to the museum, were created in Cuba in the early 1960s. These are straightforward explorations of that technique in which images such as butterflies are obviously significant but not yet weighted with the symbolic import they will acquire in later work. (Note to museum officials: If the other prints are as interesting as those on display, please consider a separate show of them.)

Marais lived in Paris for about 20 years, and there he absorbed the lessons of the avant-garde, exhibiting with the likes of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte. In these surrealistic works, he mutes his pallette, concentrates on a smaller group of symbolic objects and repeats the attenuation of limbs and facial features that are among his stylistic signatures.

He created collages as a respite from painting and, perhaps, to work through personal loss after his family was dispersed by Fidel Castro's revolution. Using photographs, he brings his family back together, the frames like walls of a house.

[Times photo: Jim Damaske] Green Mask is a surreal papier-mache sculpture created by Marais during his time in Paris.

Once he moved to Tampa and settled into an old cigar factory, Marais' art seemed to come into its own. It evolved to a magical realism in which the fantastical is presented with a matter-of-fact earnestness that makes it more approachable, less intimidating, than surrealism. His colors are day-glo bright, and his landscapes are inhabited by chairs with body parts, flowers that look radioactive, clowns, women surrounded by swirls of curtains and hair, androgynous men, butterflies and Fidel Castro, transformed like Shakespeare's Bottom into an ass, rendering him comic instead of menacing. La Dama Borracha en su Jardin (Drunken Lady in Her Garden) is among the best examples of influences converging -- an homage to Van Gogh, a nod to his surrealist brethren and an acknowledgement of his Latin American artistic heritage.

Marais does not date his work, but the show is arranged as chronologically as possible. Curator Kimberly Lomas has attached small maps to the title cards indicating whether the work was produced in Cuba, France or the United States.

Flag, a 1999 mixed media piece by AB the Flagman, is part of a folk art exhibit at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art.

"Folk art" is a more nebulous term today than it was in the 1940s when Grandma Moses was discovered by the art world. Now it often includes both rural practitioners without formal training -- like Moses -- and members of a genre known as Outsider Art: psychiatric patients, convicts, street people, troubled children. "Folk Art From the City of Orlando and the Mennello Museum" is, for the most part, a show of the former and not the latter.

Because it is primitively wrought, viewers often dismiss folk art as facile. It is not. And while failing to pursue an art education or interaction in the arts community is fatal to the work of a traditional artist, that kind of isolation is a virtue and hallmark in folk art.

Folk artists usually don't worry about using materials that will last a long time, which poses a challenge for collectors and curators. When Jesse Aaron said that God woke him on the morning of July 5, 1958, and told him to "carve wood," Aaron started hacking away at pieces with a chain saw and chisel. Boar's Head is a beautiful, textured work in cypress whose tusks have been lost over time. Archie Byron "painted" Rapper Man with sawdust and glue -- cheaper than acrylics or oils -- on boards.

Earl Cunningham, at various times a seaman, chicken farmer and junk dealer, is one of the more famous folk artists in the show. Three of his landscapes, depicting hurricanes, are also the most accessible. Despite the violence of the storms, they have a pastoral charm reminiscent of 19th century American folk art.

Shane Campbell's The Crow Column is sheer fun, a white post covered with epigrams relating to birds.

James Castle was deaf and could not speak, read or write, yet he created a haunting yard scene from soot and spit on a scrap of paper, then turned it over and drew another scene of his home. They were discovered only after his death.

You do not have to know these artists' stories to appreciate their work, but acknowledging the difficult details and quirky circumstances of their lives is a tribute they have earned.

[Times photo: Jim Damaske] Gnomon, Charles Parkhill’s 14-foot sculpture of wood, tar, copper and stone, offers visceral and intellectual punch. It is in the courtyard of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art. From its rounded base it rises like a bird in flight.

Gnomon is a 14-foot sculpture of wood, tar, copper and stone by Charles Parkhill that manages to be both imposing and delicate. Commissioned by the museum, it sits temporarily in the courtyard but will find a permanent home somewhere else on the grounds. It looks good where it is. The title comes from the stylus on a sundial that marks the time, and Gnomon does that in a larger-than-life way, casting shadows on the concrete that the artist has set with boulders. It begins in a rounded base that tapers to an elegant spire, like a bird in flight. Like many of Parkhill's sculptures, it is visceral work of craft and an intellectual piece of abstraction.

-- Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

Art review

[Times photo: Jim Damaske] Charles Parkhill’s Gnomon,

"Folk Art from the City of Orlando and the Mennello Museum," "Tomas Marais: Havana, Paris, Tampa Bay" and "Gnomon" are on view through June 23 at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursday; and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. The museum is closed Monday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors, $3 students with ID and free for children 12 and younger and museum members. For more information, call (727) 518-6833 or visit www.gulfcoastmuseum.org.

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