|
Rane & Snow
LaGro & Zimmerman Holiday Shows December 15, 2006
By Dory Hulburt
 “You don’t need paintings in the summer, you need them in the winter!” –Bill Rane
It was the day after the big snowfall. The Sangres were white-powdered and the sage flocked, breath vaporous and the cold astringent—all utterly lovely in a Zen-whack, Asian minimalist kinda way, but shrouded in an inexorability that felt like a fait accompli. I basked happily in Bill Rane’s studio, submerged in Mediterranean blues and greens, surrounded by reclining cubist women and sexy satyrs. Bill passed away a year ago, but his students Frank C. Miller and Gin Pollock celebrated his legacy in “A Touch of Rane,” an exhibit of their paintings at Rane Gallery on Ledoux Street last month.
A phrase leapt out at me from Gin’s artist statement—“unbound by abstract thought”—Bill’s aesthetic in a nutshell: the mind liberated by the senses, reveling in color, joyful hedonism, galloping paganism, delight. The Rane-ian maelstrom of smeared, smudged, and daubed color in Gin’s “Et Sus Ordenes” somehow resolved into a couple over coffee, surrounded by whimsical pets. The man wore a dressing gown or jacket, his blue-black hair converging in a widow’s peak, a wonderful lash of tomato red outlining his shoulder. His companion seemed indistinct, eclipsed by her fully realized partner, barely emerging from the background in smears of olive and purple, only one eye and lips visible, scribbles of purple at her temple and atop her head. Amid this riot of color, a spray of creamy white from a vase became a luminous focal point.
Gin also showed ink drawings in wax, like “For Bill,” in which she imagined her mentor as a satyr, whose muscled torso evoked earthiness and eroticism, ornamented by teardrops. Lines, curlicues, and swirls suggested evolving and dying universes. The curdled ink in the wax base conveyed a fitting sadness.
Frank Miller showed paintings on plaster inspired by his finds in archeological digs, like fragments of wall murals circa 4-6 AD unearthed in Carthage, Tunisia. (See his "Orbit of Sleep," above.) Frank quickly incises patterns into wet plaster, which dries in minutes, and his paintings may incorporate or counterpoint the patterning. His colors were pale and dreamlike, as if seen through cloudy water, except for blues as intense as Bill’s. Passionate rippling teal/dark aqua/cerulean/forest green/cobalt/midnight blue surrounded the reclining nude in “Seraphita”; a goose floating above her, a fish below. Scratched and mottled plaster and paint in an infinitude of oceanic blue-greens surrounded three refracted figures in “Water Ladies.”
First Bill’s student, Frank became his apprentice and then his friend. He says Bill was fond of a parable about Egyptian tomb painters, who fantastically adorned the interiors of the pyramids, and then were killed because they knew the secret passageways to the interior—an allegory, Bill thought, for the role played by contemporary artists.
Go Deeper
Randall LaGro may be on the verge of a unified field theory of painting, integrating abstract and representational art. I’ve seen a breakthrough painting on an easel in his studio: a large canvas, maybe 5 x 5 feet, with dribbles and streaks of colors like black and purple lyrically traversing the softness of incipient dawn, along with patches of brocade-like embossing, a woman’s pearlescent face, and a homunculus in a column of dark goldenrod.
Randall has been interested in synthesizing abstraction and “realism” since he was 18 years old, grappling with a lack of spirit and humanity in abstraction. His last show at Blue Rain Gallery in Taos displayed astonishingly adroit zigzags from sheer abstraction to the purely representational, with stops at various stages in between. I infer from his work that his desire to infuse abstraction with humanity is almost literal—human figures materializing out of a chaos of light and color.
“I’m writing a lot about the dance between heart and head,” said the artist, who keeps several journals simultaneously, including a spiral-bound travel book in which he can record ideas while driving. In the morning, he scribbles indiscriminate outpourings akin to automatic writing. Throughout the day he documents his insights while painting, which he may use in teaching. He also records spiritual ruminations and revelations, inspired by a strong inner voice telling him, “Go deeper.”
He can’t explain his innate, anachronistic confidence in that inner voice. He vividly remembers an epiphany in a ninth-grade English class, when he clearly heard a voice say, “On your own strength you won’t get far. But if you just let go, it will happen.” He still follows that guidance, whether wrestling with a problem in his work or facing a difficult personal decision. It sounds like Buddhist non-attachment, and he concedes that a variety of spiritual traditions have similar notions, but his confidence in his intuition seems inborn, he says. “I take it as a great gift.”
A self-described romantic artist, in terms of beauty and aspects of human nature, Randall now sees mystery suffusing his romanticism, along with a more personal voice. “I like to think that this is maturity—that my awareness kicks into a whole new level.” Noting today’s disdain for romanticism and sentimentality, he says, “They are and can be very human elements. And honest. They don’t have to be saccharine. That’s a lot on my mind in terms of my work.”
He derives inspiration from writing, words, music, a note, an image. To a collector who asked what inspired him, Randall replied, “Well, walls and floors.” Technical aspects of his and others’ work, like shifts in color, induce insights.
His work with monotypes informs his painting, deepening his understanding of the emotional qualities of color. The monochrome sepia-brown in which he renders his recent monotypes (reminiscent of albumen prints) circumvents emotion and “takes us to a deeper place,” he feels. He is bemused that viewers often describe his prints as dark, because squiggles in the ink “just kind of take a life of their own and I follow it.” The results are phantasmagorical: figures leaning over the sides of ships gazing on monster-filled seas or tableaux vivants in which women cavort on trapeze-like swings, laugh over their shoulders, or shyly avert their heads before gallant or devilish men, while peculiar pets frolic about them. Otherworldly, these prints also seem strangely familiar, as if triggering recognition by the communal unconscious.
He paints in the former Joseph Sharp studio on a ridge overlooking Quesnel Street, a wonderfully monastic space overflowing with books and paints, art supplies and easels displaying finished and unfinished work, journals open to handwritten pages with pens at the ready—all softened, the day I visited, by cool, gray winter light filtering in the windows. He now does most of his printmaking at a house on Hondo Mesa.
After he arrived in Taos, someone gave Randall a gift, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters To A Young Poet.” It was “my first resonance that ‘this is what you are,’” he said, making sense of all his years alone, his solitude, his faith in his inner voice. “I can’t give you any advice but this”; Rilke wrote, “to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create.”
“Innovations in Iconography,” new works by Randall LaGro, Gustavo Victor Goler, and Jim Vogel, premieres at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe on Dec. 15 and runs through Jan. 6.
Sinister Beauty
Zoë Zimmerman’s soft, sepia-like photographs of burnings, frozen fish, dead birds, and images distorted by water have a dark side. Pure beauty “is too easy. That’s not part of my reality,” she says. “I’m comforted by that, actually: that everything is a duality.” Hence her admiration for renowned photographer Edward Steichen’s heavy roses and Joel-Peter Witkin’s grotesquerie, “so horrifying and so beautiful,” she says. “I’m like what Joel-Peter Witkin would be if he was a squeamish seven-year-old girl.”
It’s been a 20-year journey from pretty pictures to burning birds’ nests and pendantly nude pregnant women. Zoë first had to create a process that freed her to explore her extremely personal vision.
She was a waitress with a BFA in photography when a friend, unable to master albumen printing for a project, told her she could have the job—and the pay—if she could figure it out. Zoë taught herself the 19th-century handmade printing process and her first albumen prints ended up in a book published by Aperture Press.
But it took years for her to master traditional albumen printing, which “has a subtle delicacy and clarity of detail that has not been surpassed by advances in photographic technology,” she writes in her resume. Her work—conventional landscapes and still lifes—got attention, but not, she felt, for its artistic value. She can recite from memory the last, and only critical line in an otherwise glowing review by Diane Armitage of THE magazine: “What Ms. Zimmerman lacks in personal expression she makes up in technical excellence.” Ouch.
Technical excellence in an archaic process “is like chainsaw juggling,” says Zoe. “It’s easy to be the best.” So she went beyond, developing her own albumen printing recipe and method, and controlling every step, from hand-making the paper to separating the eggs for the albumen. Developing her own “language” liberated her to focus on content.
Turning point: the burning nightgowns. In a mood that needs no explanation if you’ve got an ounce of yin, she decided to “do a cathartic arson.” The photographs were never meant to be shared, but “I looked at the pictures and went, ‘Wow! I’m going to burn something else!’” She left behind landscapes and still lifes and made a leap from conduit to creator; from finding and recording to initiating and composing. It’s “harder, more exciting,” she says. It’s also very personal. Her brother once came into her studio while she was hanging up a worm-eaten cabbage with a clod of earth attached, and she was as mortified as if she’d been caught in flagrante delicto.
“My work is so personal now people don’t even understand it,” Zoë says proudly.
Take that, Ms. Armitage.
See Zoë’s new photographs, “Acts of Nature,” at the Harwood Museum Jan. 12-March 4; public opening Jan. 18, 5-7 p.m. She’ll simultaneously exhibit “lighter,” “more feminine” photos at Fenix Gallery, where she’ll give a gallery talk on Feb. 11 at 4 p.m.
Postscript: Pop Culture
With respect to the outcry over Marc Campbell’s column about radio in last month’s Horse Fly, how inspiring to see men and women alike raising their pens and their voices in support of the right of women to be treated as a niche market. We’ve come a long way indeed, baby.
See/n
Total Arts Gallery, 122A Kit Carson Road, toasts the holidays with refreshments; mezzotints by French artist Laurent Schkolnyk; Doug West serigraphs; Barbara Zaring and J.K. Lamkin lithographs; Teruko Wilde engravings, monoprints, giclées, and posters; and Don Brackett giclées and posters, Dec. 15, 4-6 p.m.
Experience “Life in the Abstract” through Dec. 24 at Starving Artists Gallery, 216-C Paseo del Pueblo Norte: paintings by Las Vegas, New Mexico’s Dorothy Chase Keightley, whose “bold lines and colors reflect life’s emotions,” and the terra cotta sculpture of Johanna Limvere Keenan, embodying the human spirit.
Painter Carla Romero’s southwestern meditations can be seen at Grimshaw Fine Art, 132 Kit Carson Rd., through Dec. 27.
“Winter Bones,” Gendron Jensen’s stark and delicate “lithographs and a drawing” of skeletal components repose at Parks Gallery, 127 Bent St., through Jan. 8.
Join the dance of weather, light, and space in “Solace,” Suzanne Wiggin’s new oils and monoprints, at Fenix Gallery, 208-A Ranchitos Rd., through Jan. 10.
Farnsworth Gallery, 133 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, ho-ho-hosts “It’s About Giving,” paintings starting at $100 by members of the Taos National Society of Watercolorists to benefit The Dreamtree Project, through Jan. 10.
Works by dozens of local artists are available at El Monte Sagrado’s Grand Bohemian Gallery through Jan. 15 to benefit Scrimshaw family members seriously injured by a drunk driver in Santa Fe. Stephanie Scrimshaw, mother of the three injured children, is El Monte’s restaurant manager. Call 758-3502 for further information.
Groove to print and platinum photographs from the Age of Aquarius by Jim Marshall, Baron Wolman, and Michael Zagaris at the new Gallery LouLou, 70 Ranchos Plaza. Opening reception Dec. 15, 6:30-10 p.m., RSVP. Show closes Jan. 31.
Forty-five artworks by writer, social innovator, and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, selected by curator and Seton scholar David L. Witt, are available for adoption by donation at www.aloveoflearning.com. Funds finance the conservation and framing of the adopted pieces.
See more about holiday celebrations at local galleries in “Taos Style,” page 12.
|
