It’s always interesting to see artists working in different media. In some cases, such as with Edgar Degas and Pablo Picasso, the imagery of their painting translates fairly intact to another medium. Degas’s bronzes looked pretty faithfully lifted from his canvases, and Picasso’s folksy Spanish iconography merely transfers to another type of surface in his ceramics. In other cases, the connections are less apparent. Though we can certainly see threads between Nancy Graves’s tree-like sculptures weaving into her aerial landscape paintings, the link is more elusive.

We don’t get a chance to compare Patt Franklin’s ceramics (her primary medium for many years) with her painting in the gorgeously sensual “Patt Franklin Paintings” show currently at the Mayo Street Arts’ pop-up gallery on Washington Avenue (through April 24), which was guest curated by June Fitzpatrick.

But it is unnecessary, in the sense that the corporality of clay – the substantiality of its mass, density and elasticity – seems deeply imbedded in the way this artist applies paint to canvas. It is easy to imagine, were these works to suddenly pop from two into three dimensions, how Franklin would have shaped and molded these visual forms.

Just inside the door of the gallery are two of Franklin’s most recent works, “Of the Treehouse Tree 1 and 2,” both completed this year. There is also the first treehouse painting, created in 1993. It is one of Franklin’s habits to make paintings in series, but not necessarily in a linear way. She may start a series, detour into another series, then return to the former years later. This can happen with individual paintings as well, as in one of two “Rainforest Series Diptych” works, one panel of which was painted in 2004, the other in 2009.

The names of the “Treehouse” pieces are attributable to a makeshift structure that used to be perched in a tree on her Gorham property. Like all her paintings, they are essentially abstractions. Yet we can definitely discern their resemblance to trees because we can make out branchlike forms and intimations of a green canopy.

Set against a sky of vivid sunset orangey-pinks, the trees emanate a sculptural, three-dimensional property that is palpable. From a distance, they come off almost like bas relief, an effect achieved by the contrast of the sky color, but also in the way they seem to take up space on the canvases, appearing to both recede and pop off the surface plane. It also has to do with the dimensionality Franklin builds into the works with her dense layering of different values of single colors, particularly the greens.

It should be noted that these three are the only works in the show executed in acrylic. Franklin has always worked with oil paint then applied a coat of a glossy medium that gave them a shiny reflectivity, imparting a liquid quality to the colors and also intensifying their vibrancy. It turned out that this medium was quite toxic, especially to her lungs, leaving her to sound at times like she is a little short of breath.

Several works in the show simply dispense with the clear coat. This is more than understandable considering the circumstances. Lamentably, however, in doing so they lose something in the process. “Path” (2002) and “Rainforest” (2006), for example (the images are reproduced on the exhibition announcement), look flat by comparison. Though they engage the same energetically swirling, roiling brushstrokes, the matte quality of the paint tends to slow down – or in the case of “Path,” virtually stop – the sense of fluid movement that brings such life to other works. It is not a criticism; simply a health-conscious reality.

In the “Treehouse” canvases, the polymer emulsions, plasticizers and silicon oils in the acrylic paints tend to mimic, though not exactly replicate, the clear sheen of the formerly deployed medium (one hopes, for Franklin, without the toxicity). It is enough to conjure the radiant effulgence of earlier paintings like “Tidal” (1997) and “Tidals II” (1998).

It’s probably obvious by now that Franklin’s inspiration is nature. Yet super realism does not interest her. Indeed, that approach would blunt the power of her canvases, some of which look bigger than the artist herself. Their size certainly helps convey environments that are experientially enveloping. But by walking the line between abstraction and representation, the unmistakable takeaway from these images is of the sheer primal force of nature.

“Tidals II,” a densely layered work, all at once portrays the mighty rush of water crashing against rocks, the resulting sea foam and spray, and the outgoing tidal woosh. It telegraphs the violent beauty and awesomeness of the event as perfectly as a realistic Winslow Homer seascape but does so without clearly defining a single rock or cascade of saltwater. It also brings us up close to the action by viewing it from a perilously proximal aerial perspective that might make your heart skip a beat.

The sultry ecosystem of the rain forest is another of Franklin’s favorite subjects. Imagine looking at a steamy jungle floor through a translucent piece of glass that blurs individual bioforms and you begin to understand the two “Rainforest Series Diptychs” and nine smaller “Rainforest Studies.” In the largest diptych, we can feel the presence of mosses, lichens, verdant foliage, dirt, decomposing leaves and rotting wood, and occasional areas of yellow and red tropical blooms. The painting abstractly evokes the endless cycle of teeming life and inevitable death and decay.

The other diptych is set against a deep blue that, like the “Treehouse” paintings, makes the greens and pinks practically pop off the surface of the canvases at the viewer. The pink markings particularly recall the spiky spadix of anthurium, which rises from the spath, or modified leaf form of the plant. There could hardly be a more sexual-looking species of flora. It bears both male and female structures and can recall the reproductive organs of both men (spadix) and women (spath). This only serves to emphasize the incessant lushness and fertility of the rain forest.

Though Franklin herself was not aware of it, a friend who accompanied me to the show pointed out that one of the studies revealed what seemed like a pretty clearly outlined naked female torso. Franklin smiled mischievously and shrugged her shoulders. “Yes, probably,” she admitted. Whether consciously or unconsciously, however, this served to underline for me the deeper meaning of these ravishing works: nature is always creating new life, the rhythms and forces of which are constantly moving and blooming and exploding off of Franklin’s paintings.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

« Previous

Peaks Island artist turns travels to India into tapestries

Next »

How ‘Shiva Baby’ captures the anxieties of being a young woman