Art

Art brushed by life

In a retrospective of Arline Erdrich's work, it may be possible to detect personal experience's effect on artistry.

	[Images from Gulf Coast Museum of Art]
	Arline Erdrich, Carnivale I, Myth and Mysticism, Bread and Circuses, acrylic/Acryllage on canvas.
	Arline Erdrich, Tapestry of a Woman, 1975, watercolor, pen and ink on paper.

LARGO - You have only to look at Arline Erdrich's art to know that she has experienced some life-altering events. Who hasn't past a certain age, you might ask; but there are degrees.

For example: Heart problems have brought the artist, who delines to give her age, close to death several times, and she survived the no-name storm of 1993, which left most of Aripeka, the community in Hernando County where she lives, under about 12 feet of water.

I chose not to know those facts the first time I went through "Merging, Emerging" at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art because, while acknowledging the inevitable personal references we layer on it, I believe art deserves to be judged as objectively as possible.

However, this art is not meant to be viewed objectively. Even when Erdrich paints in an almost completely abstract idiom, she's grabbing you by the lapels and hauling you over To See What This Means. It's mostly decipherable. Sometimes, it's really fabulous.

You're eased in slowly; realist paintings and drawings from the 1970s open the exhibition. A sweetly rendered watercolor, Tapestry of Woman, is composed like an early Renaissance illumination, with traditional symbolism and imagery that presage later, more obscure, personal symbols.

Domestic concerns loomed large in her life 30 years ago. The self-portraits show a woman, not unhappy so much as consumed by household responsibilities. In Woman with Laundry, a pen and ink from 1974, she sits, briefly, surrounded by piles of folded clothes and those waiting in a basket, her chin resting on a careworn claw of a hand. Her back is to us in Gothic Woman, a painting from 1976, as she furiously irons. Instead of the TV we might expect, facing her and us is a blank canvas propped on an easel, nearby jars of paint untouched and almost anthropomorphic in their silent accusation.

Two paintings from 1980 indicate some surfeit of a chore-bound life. They also indicate a shift from earth-bound figuratism. Prairie Tall Grasses and Wild Flowers is obviously a landscape, but the placement of planes on the canvas and an emphasis on establishing tonal values in the deep colors seem more important to the artist than scenic depiction.

Double Wedding Ring Quilt is the first example in the show of a technique Erdrich developed and named (and copyrighted), Acryllage. It's a collaging technique that uses thick layers of dried paint from the splattered plastic sheeting that covers her studio floor. She pieces together the randomly occurring colors and cuts shapes, then coats them with varnish and affixes them to a painted canvas. After the varnish dries, the plastic is peeled away and the acrylic paint remains. She uses the technique simply and straightforwardly in this painting, but she's on the move toward something new.

Perhaps one must suffer to achieve a level of profundity. At that point in her life, Erdrich had almost died from Hodgkin's disease (which resulted in a weakened heart and subsequent health problems), and, as would most people, she probably began thinking less about laundry and more about life. Garrafon Reef I, 1983, is a long way from the powerful works she would create 20 years later, more like a painted version of a satellite map, but she's raising her eyes above the horizon line.

An interest in Eastern spiritualism informs later works, sometimes melded with symbols that have an American Indian feel. She also introduces a recurring image, the T-shape, which Kevin Dean, who wrote the catalog essay, says references "the Greek symbol Tau (representing life and the spirit) and the kimonos worn by women in China and Japan." I add that, in paintings from the late 1980s and early '90s, it evokes the streamlined shape of a bird in flight in the triptych The Heros: Spirit of the Eagles and the T-shaped canvas of Mick-I-Ching that sports a painted eagle's head at its apex.

Two paintings from the Chaos series created after the calamitous 1993 flood wash away a lot of old baggage, it seems. The shrouded figure in both is an homage to a neighbor who rowed his family to safety in Erdrich's stilt house, then collapsed and died on her floor from the effort. The corpse in The Whole is Greater is lit from within and seems to float in a primordial current of dark shapes, attended to by a large black dog as snakes slither around. A heart floats nearby as does a multicolored orb.

In Sally's House and Night of Tumult, the shrouded figure is in a boat, presumably on his journey across the River Styx, the light now glowing from the boat's stern. The heart is part of a female watchkeeper, the dog is now tiny and still standing guard. The bright orb has morphed into a phoenix, its bright plumes swirling around the gloom. It's a scene of farewell and hello.

Massive heart failure in 2000 brought Erdrich yet closer to death and was a signal to all who knew her, even when she pulled through, that her painting days were over. She proved them wrong and in recent paintings seems to embrace life and painting with increasing vigor. Passages, four paintings grouped to be viewed as if reading a clock, are landscapes of the same trees seen at different times of the day. Light playing against sturdy trunks flickers in Dusk, dims in Twilight and glimmers in Dawn. It bursts forth in Tomorrow at Noon like a wish for one more day.

The symbols - dog, heart, protector - of the Chaos series return in the three paintings completed this year, all titled Carnivale, with different subtitles. They pay tribute most of all to the phoenix, mythical bird of rebirth. In all of them, the bird's plumage glows with rich colors against a dark surface, ready to take flight but pausing here, for as long as we care to look.

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

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