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Sunday, February 12, 2006
ART REVIEW: Philip Isaacson
Truly, a center of contemporary Maine art
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The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is a reliable tonic. Walk in and your spirits pop. You face a big room with a lot in it and everything hits you all at once. You have to elect a route through the place to tie an event together. The whole experience is fetchingly idiosyncratic. It's not a matter of a small-town gallery acting like a big-city museum; rather, it's a very savvy place doing its own thing and having a great time in the process. "Facing Up" is installed in the center's top chamber. It's a show of photographic portraits of Maine artists. On a casual level, it's fun to match up faces with the memory of works. Do artists grow to look like their work? A photographer might make that happen. Without going into detail, there's a portrait by Philip Rogers of Robert Hamilton in an old, beat-up car and one by William Thus of Eric Hopkins in his studio that remind me of the physical structure of their paintings. If I had never met Hamilton or Hopkins, I would not have been surprised by these portraits. More to the point, I think, is the special burden imposed on a photographer who undertakes to make portraits of artists. In addition to the normal obligation of producing an image that the subject will find congenial, the photographer is dealing with people who have their own established views on aesthetics. They're apt to have opinions on what a photograph should look like and the depth to which the result should probe. To be successful, the photographer has to be in control, but artists aren't easy to control, and the photographer shouldn't interpose himself between the subject and the image. Still, in several of the prints in this show, I did feel the presence of the photographer. It goes beyond style. It's a matter of reshaping the subject, and that's bad. I know some of the artists and some among them are not "in" the photographs of them. What did I particularly like among the 40 items? Thus' image of Cynthia Hyde speaks directly to the subject with authenticity and without artifice. Greg Morley's view of Linden Frederick in his studio has an appealing immediacy. Frederick is there and you know it. Peggy McKenna's portrait of Stephen Pace has the same objectivity that I find in the Hyde portrait. On the other hand, I thought her photograph of Alex Katz a bit artful and forced. I liked a lot more, including Liv Kristin Robinson's image of Dennis Pinette in his studio. Margot Balboni's group "Looking Back" records the backs of the heads of nine artists. I'm sympathetic to the effort, but in the end there's less there than meets the eye, although I found Alan Crichton's haircut particularly felicitous. A LIVELY 'STILL LIFE' The main floor is given over to "Still Life." In it we find 40 again - a biblical unit - but this time it represents the number of artists. I can't draw general conclusions other than to say that there are some very good paintings in this show. There are works in other media, but they tend to get lost in an event of this size. The site of honor - on the far wall - is awarded to "Permalba, 2004," a very large painting by Sharon Yates. In all fairness, it's a bit of a push to call the work a still life. The composition is dominated by a full-length self-portrait of Yates. The accoutrements of her studio and a few models - e.g., taxidermied birds - surround her. The concept has remarkable coherence. There is a lot going on, but Yates pulls it together. Perhaps it would be better to say that she keeps it under firm control. As disparate as the components are, they work to a common goal and that is to elevate the self-portrait. It is less a matter of the artist surveying the studio than the studio defining the artist. It is a stunning painting and suggests itself as a chef d'oeuvre. Yates works with structural assurance and lavish color on a courageous scale and invests it all with palpable animation. This painting hops. In that respect it reminds me of the small paintings of cows that the painter has shown in past years. These creatures seemed ready to amble off the frame at an impulse. Genetta McLean's "Goldfinch and Seckel Pears" is one of three small paintings by her that do observe the title of the show. In them McLean has moved from the somber history-sensitive linear arrangements that characterized earlier work that I have seen to more joyous and more animated forms. Although still formal, natural botanic complexities are, by their nature, celebratory and draw the viewer in. These are beautifully wrought paintings that avoid the sense of preciousness that often taints their subject matter and scale. A few words about Joseph Nicoletti's painting "Still Life with Self-Portrait." It is one of the most persuasive works by him that I have seen. It is conclusive, pulled-together, full of spirit with generous references to history and perhaps theology. As a shrewdly constructed small work, it will, I suspect, have a notable position in his oeuvre. One show in the lower level is a group of small - 10- by 11-inch or so - paintings accomplished on layers of Plexiglas by Anna Hepler. They are exquisite exercises in minimalism that exist in perfect space. Dots on the surface of each layer are connected by filament lines to form ephemeral circular shapes. The lines cannot descend into the next level, but the layers are arranged so that they appear to do so and thus form fine apparent basket-like entities. Often several such shapes occupy a single work, giving rise to celestial fantasies. Here, for once, precious is not a bad word. Philip Isaacson of Lewiston has been writing about the arts for the Maine Sunday Telegram for 39 years. He can be contacted at: pmisaacson@isaacsonraymond.com
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