Two and a half years ago, artist Arline Erdrich marked time at a hospice. Then a museum director "put a future in my life."
By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
Published May 2, 2004
Two and a half years ago, Ken Rollins drove from his office in Largo up to Aripeka on the Pasco-Hernando line to visit artist Arline Erdrich.
Rollins is the director of the Gulf Coast Museum of Art at Pinewood Cultural Park, and he had heard the sad news that Erdrich was close to death. Indeed, she had just come home from a stay at a hospice center, where she had been sent following serious heart surgery in Tampa.
"We were going to discuss my paintings," Erdrich recalled. "He wanted to talk about donating them to the museum and to other places where they could be donated."
As the visit progressed, Rollins changed his mind.
"He started talking about an exhibition. He said a retrospective two years hence. I was shocked. I didn't know if I would be here in two years," Erdrich said.
"He put a future in my life."
Rollins left, and Erdrich got busy.
"First of all, I had to work on restoring myself," she said.
She began daily workouts at a local gym, where she now does 2 miles on a steeply inclined treadmill in a half hour.
But perhaps more important for both her physical and mental well-being, she immersed herself into her art.
"After that visit, I said "I have to put some real work behind this'," she said.
She began a series of seven large paintings, launched a new project - floor cloths made from heavy-duty canvas, a contemporary take on an art form used more than 300 years ago in the New World to protect or fake precious rugs - designed her own Web site (www.arlineerdrich.com) and created a lot of work on paper.
"So I have been working really steadily," she said.
On Friday, examples from the past 30 years of her artworks will go on exhibit at the new Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, where they will remain until June 27.
Included in the exhibit, Merging, Emerging: Arline Erdrich - a Thirty-Year Retrospective, are Erdrich's early works relating to feminist identity, others from the period when she was into Eastern philosophy, which she calls the Tau/Tao paintings, and the powerful "Chaos Series" she created after the no-name storm in 1993.
The show also has works completed in the past two years: Passages and three paintings from the Carnivale Series.
Both the early, representational works and the later abstract surrealistic pieces are intensely colored.
The later ones usually incorporate a unique Erdrich technique she has named and copyrighted as "acryllage."
She developed the technique several years ago when she noticed that the paint drippings on the floor beneath her work area created unusual patterns. Once they built up, she lifted them off the plastic floor coverings, cut them in the desired shapes and began applying them with varnish to a prepared canvas to make an image or backdrop. Once that dries, she paints figures and symbols on them to complete the work.
Her art has been exhibited across western Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. She has received grant awards from several foundations to continue her studies.
"Two years ago, my family had cleaned out the pantry and the freezer, rolled up the rugs and everything was stacked up and ready to go," she says of the weeks she spent near death.
But she says healthy eating, exercise, meditation and immersing herself in her art have turned that around.
"My physical condition was quite a bit different then than it is now," said Erdrich, who would not disclose her age. "When your life depends on it, it's a no-brainer."
