Power Gardener: Sarah Fairchild's Lush Plot

"Just close your eyes," I'd like to say, "and imagine the paintings I will describe to you." 

"They are very large, with backgrounds of metallic paints that shimmer and change colors as you approach from different directions. Gigantic floral forms are painted in hot magenta on top of the iridescent backgrounds. These huge pink plants are meticulously detailed, rendered with every vein and shadow. Their stems, stalks, and leaves, though, are made of fuzzy blue flocking." 

Where would you expect to find art fitting that description? In a head shop? In a bordello? In a bridal supply warehouse? 

Or at the Farmer's Exchange? For all of those meticulously executed, exotic and erotic forms are representations of truck farm produce. Corn stalks and brussels sprouts are the points of departure into Fairchild's splendid phantasmagoria. 

Sarah Fairchild, Zucchini and Nut Grass. Acrylic and nylon flocking on paper. 51 x 67 inches. Courtesy, 
Hammond Harkins Galleries.

Fairchild's solo show, Lush, is currently at Hammond Harkins Galleries in Bexley, Ohio. I have every hope that pieces from this show will be on display long after the gallery closing, ending up in one of our regions' excellent art museums. It would be very strange were their contemporary curators not looking seriously at this work and arranging their budgets for purchase.

This is the most gutsy and accomplished show of painting I've ever seen in Columbus. It is an uncanny balance of beauty, ferocity, and restraint. To see this work is to be mesmerized; to fall under the influence of an irresistible presence.

Flocking on top of iridescent paint.

Zucchini and Nut Grass, above, like all this work, is hard to photograph, for the colors and the holographic shine of the metallic background cannot be truly captured. Unique to Fairchild's painting is the creation of three layers with distinct surface properties. Yet she's able to integrate iridescent shine with completely light-absorbent flocking laid atop matte acrylic paint. How she came to conceive of this combination is the sort of genius that is either deeply intuitive or outrageously daring. In either event, it reveals that bravura confidence of an artist absorbed in her vision to the exclusion of everything else.


Fairchild acknowledges her love of Charles Burchfield's wallpapers and it's easy to see why she relates to them: the large-scale natural forms in asymmetrical repetition, plus the highly decorative elements of her paintings certainly tip their hat in that direction. Fairchild's paintings assert themselves far beyond design alone, however. The size of most of these is wall-consuming. The thought of repetition at such grand size only underscores how singularly her images are poised on the edge of science fiction or fantasy without stretching our sensibilities to the breaking point.

Detail of acrylic painting

Either close up or from across the room, the viewer has to be mesmerized by the intricacy of Fairchild's paintings. The meticulous workmanship is not a token of fastidiousness, but it's the history of the painter's absorption. The commitment to such a high level of realism in the context of a surreal forcefield of color and texture is an index of Fairchild's comfort with her extraordinary vision.

Zucchini blossoms

Those shiny, decorative backgrounds revealed between the foliage add psychological edge, emotional depth, and spatial ambiguity to the paintings. In Zucchini and Nut Grass, the title tames the sprawling pink form that might otherwise be read as a menacing, invasive super species—the stuff of science fiction. Once we've reassured ourselves however, that, "it's only zucchini," we are still left with the repeated shining concentric circles, blinkless, in the background. Are they eyes looking through the organism? Are they lights that throw the forms into this simplified relief? Or, are they merely visual echoes of the interiors of squash blossoms, there to reinforce the reality of the subject? This is Fairchild's special zone, between literality and the far shores of suggestion.


It's not only in Zucchini and Nut Grass, but in other paintings too that I find Fairchild's vision of Nature less related to Charles Burchfield's (see Starr Review, March 23, 2013) than to Henri Rousseau's. In design, she shares much with Burchfield; in feeling and power, she communicates the managed potential for ferocity found in Rousseau's mysterious, alluring jungles. 

Sarah Fairchild, Brussels Sprouts and Sweetcorn. Acrylic and nylon flocking on paper, 51 x 80 inches.
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries.

Brussels Sprouts and Sweetcorn lies, like most of Fairchild's work, somewhere between a landscape and a still life. Scrutiny of the left side reveals a tall stalk of brussels sprouts ready for harvest growing among the corn. On the right side, overblown sprouts fall forward toward us, like roses past their prime in an elegiac interior. The cornstalks form a row of consistent measure across the painting, while the sprouts change scale dramatically, moving from distant ("outdoors") to present (close enough to touch).     

 

Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm, 1891.

Among this painting's details and transformations of scale are many secret hiding places—where Rousseau's big cats would lurk. On Fairchild's surface, we find ourselves investigating not the variegations of the color palette, though, but the holes that the bright, "negative" background space punch out among the pink and blue foliage. The silver under-layer almost literally tears its way toward the surface. Both the contrast of high and low values and the intricacy of the spaces carved out by those contrasts gives visual hints of some elusive, dynamic form among the layers. We may not be able to pin down a hiding tiger, but there's definitely a sense that we could be taken unawares by a sudden, unanticipated emergence from the complex scene.

Sarah Fairchild, Chinese Cabbage. Acrylic, silkscreen and
nylon flocking on paper, 52 x 36 inches.
Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Galleries.

When we catch our breath in awe, seeing a queen in her gown, robes and jewels, the reaction can be attributed to the beauty and carriage of the person herself, or to the awe imparted by the fineness of the regalia. The combination, though, leaves no room for doubt that we are in the presence of the most magnificent and admirable of women. 

Chinese Cabbage must be the name of royalty, for this painting elicits that kind of response. Is the cabbage so beautiful, or is it her raiment that induces so worshipful a response? Fairchild has made a portrait so close-up that the edges are cropped and even the "age spots"—the holes bitten through by insects—are meticulously detailed along with every fold and flourish. Weeds are the lace around this face, and they are set off against the opalescent, blue to violet background. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Pink Sweet Peas,1927.
Pastel on paper, 28 x 21."

It's hard not to connect the image with Georgia
O'Keeffe's close-ups of irises, sweet-peas, and other flowers with vaginal and vulvar forms. The most robust of O'Keeffe's, though, are feminine in a way that is softer and more sensual than Fairchild's. They are indeed lush, but in a way that is smooth, fresh, with every implication of youthful virginity. The flower is not separated from a background by any weedy, stubbly imperfections, as Fairchild's chinese cabbage is. But then, a vegetable is in a post-floral stage of life. A vegetable is about seeds, not seduction. 

Fairchild's painting is indeed deeply sensual, and some would say that all of her work is very sexy. To call it "sexy" is, I think, too reductive and simplistic. 

Sarah Fairchild, Red Cabbage. Acrylic and nylon
 flocking on paper. 72 x 54 inches. Courtesy,
Hammond Harkins Gallery.

The difference does indeed seem to lie between the flower and the fruit. Fairchild never particularly valorizes blossoms over other parts of a plant. Cornstalks; corn silk; brussels sprouts on the stem; worm-eaten leaves; nosegays of field weeds: She does not fetishize the obvious botanical symbols of feminine beauty or ripeness. While she emphasizes the lush, the attention-getting, and the artful, the feminine element of her work lies in its ageless confidence and comfort, its "warts-and-all" self-display on its own terms. 

The unlikely mixture of elements from which Fairchild creates her paintings tells us from the beginning that she is not invested in a unitary aesthetic or theory about beauty or power. If anything is genuinely feminine about her work in a sexy way, it is her womanly confidence in her choices of matter, materials, and methods. Fairchild turns her tenacious, time-consuming process into a luxury: She knows what she wants to do; she doesn't ask permission; her love and her will show in the power of the work. 

Fairchild's sensual work is clearly the product of a woman with no use for rules that she hasn't made herself, and with a conception of femininity untrammeled by the ideas that maturity must be touched up, or that ripeness, intuition, and definition are beyond desire.

"Four (Outstanding) Ways of Looking" at the Lindsay Gallery

Laura Bidwa, Tromage, 2012, detail. Acrylic and oil on panel, 
17 x 22."

Linda Gall curated the beautiful painting show, Four Ways of Looking, installed at the Lindsay Gallery in Columbus until the end of March. I've read elsewhere the suggestion that there is an environmental topic that organizes the show. It's a stretch to see that, and why try? The show is so well organized aesthetically that Gall's talents shine through as much on the curatorial level as through her witty painting.

Gall has chosen only two works by each of the artists—Laura Bidwa, Sarah Fairchild, Laura Sanders, and herself. She's placed one large painting by each artist in the airy front room, and a small one in the busy back room, where work by some regular gallery artists also hangs. 

In the main room, each of the four paintings is more than strong enough to bear the exposure it gets; and all are unquestionably peers. Fairchild and Sanders create obvious drama in their work; Bidwa and Gall present with restraint. The paintings are hung for excellent visual balance and they provide an engaging variety of experiences for the viewer's imagination. Each painting stands out for its unique expression, and each is enhanced by contrast with those around it. Yet there is no sense of competition for notice; the balance is perfect. This is truly artful curating, to generate the sense that each work might lose a little once it's removed from its neighborly relationships when the show closes.

Laura Bidwa, Tromage, 2012. Acrylic and oil on panel, 17 x 22."

Laura Bidwa's Tromage fascinates me with its many floating levels, all as thin as transparencies laid atop one another on a panel of seeming worn, black linen. I found myself holding my breath in the face of the mysterious calmness, which seemed to mask something explosive. The detail above gives a better indication of how colorful is the central figure, sitting like a Buddha on the floor. But, as the detail shows, it is not really a mass, but a series of ambient layers, atop which the red line moves like a descant. The bee's flight over a flower? The blood vessels bringing life to the brain? Separation and unity, life and indifference—I could contemplate this painting and its spectrum of thought for a long, long time. 

Laura Bidwa, Wanted To, 2004/2012, colored pencil,
acrylic and oil on panel, 12 x 15."

Bidwa, Wanted To, detail

Bidwa's smaller offering, Wanted To, offers a similar pleasure, but it is even more minimal and diaphanous. Here, the single event on the streaked plane of black over white gives the impression that it is crawling or slithering into the picture plane. To me it looks like nothing sensate lest it be a body part, an organ—or even a thought—given a life of its own. Sweetbreads, a gland, for it has the fragile transparency of the fluid organic? As I do with Tromage, I react in complicated ways to this painting's beauty and to its mixed sensory signals. The horizontal brushstrokes of the background suggest speed; the lumpish form suggests the opposite and seems particularly determined, therefore, especially in its position on the "floor." I feel like the painter has put me on the fence between the wonderful and the sinister. Part of me "wants to" immerse myself in this, and part doesn't dare.

Sarah Fairchild, Lettuce and
Lambsquarters, detail

Sarah Fairchild, Lettuce and Lambsquarters, 2012. Acrylic and flocking on paper,
36 x 52."

Sarah Fairchild's paintings could not be more different in look—they are as decadent as Bidwa's are spare—yet they, too, walk the line between surreal beauty and something more. They are like the vegetal versions of full frontal nudity. Her nominal subject "the beauty of local food – farm to table – [that] raises awareness of what we eat" isn't to my eye at all what is delivered here, though it may be the point of departure into her world of sensual magic. I'm not lingering in these to eat my peas. The beauty of her work is the way she runs natural forms through the fiery furnace of her vision—her way of seeing, which is in iridescence, flocking, and colors nature rarely shows us. Her work brings intense aestheticism into a crashing encounter with flowery sensuality in something unique and wonderful—boudoir meets psychedelic opera. 

Sarah Fairchild, Silks, 2012. Silkscreen, acrylic, and flocking on paper, 11 x 30."

I was amused by Fairchild's mixed-media Silks, which I at first considered to be named for the fabrics flowing from the torsos of dancers. Of course, its for the silk atop the ears of corn on the stalks represented here. I like the way that the image can so easily be taken either way—or no way at all, appreciated for its rhythm and light symmetry, its formal whimsy. 

Laura Fairchild, Drinking Water, 2012. Oil on wood, 5 x 6."

Lush painting takes a different direction in the hands of Laura Sanders. Her humble subject matter gets realistic treatment, but her lavish handling of oil paint creates a magic different from but no less enthralling than Fairchild's. Of the painters represented here, photographs do least justice to Sanders's work because her "live" surfaces give the impression that she has delivered paintings straight from the easel to the gallery wall, they are so wet and fresh. While her work conveys the sense of literal, eye-witness detail, she paints with broad brushes, in thick slabs. While the keenness of observation is arresting, the presence of artifice is very evidently what takes you there. 

Sanders's paintings create high drama from an everyday, backyard scene. In this, they are consonant with the other work in the show. All of these artists seemingly take nothing in particular as their focal points and make emotional mountains thereof. Everybody's doing it these days? I think that's largely true, but I like the way these four embrace the stage so unabashedly.

Laura Sanders, Consume, 2012. Oil on canvas, 21 x 34."

Linda Gall's paintings, while spare indeed, and dry as the wood panel they are painted on, are the most theatrical of all. Her protagonists are not mysterious forms or figures in dramatic lighting, but china figurines whose expressions and poses are given. They come ready-made, and their virtue is in the ease with which they can be interpreted. Gall takes advantage of stock characters by putting them on stages not decorated for their dramas. She poses them in ironical situations or in settings they were not cast for.

Linda Gall, It's Just Lust, 2013. Acrylic on wood panel, 36 x 36."

Gall has painted on panel that she's left unfinished where it was unnecessary to represent something positive. In It's Just Lust, white, unshaded patterns of paint represent water that froths and splashes around the figures, who are painted in great detail—as their originals would have been in the china factories. The piles supporting an unseen pier get naturalistic treatment that contrasts in yet another way with the artificiality of the "water" and the idealized realism of the figurines. We are not simply asked to suspend our disbelief in this theater, but to wonder how to construct reality in the first place. Or, we can accept that this is life: Everyday we go about the world claiming coherence for what we make of inevitably patchwork perception. At any moment we see life simultaneously as flatly abstract, idealized, and defined by accepted scientific theory.

Linda Gall, It's Just Lust, detail.

Gall's work is, to my mind, very funny. It's Just Lust could be subtitled, Under the Boardwalk. Three other figures have their backs turned to the passionate couple, surely imagined as a swain and milkmaid from an inland, cottage scene. The shepherdess with her lamb raises one hand to a tearful eye: Has Bo-Peep lost her sheep? Or is she shocked by the scene? Or by the invitation implied in that luscious, red, wet slice of melon offered her? All this in the white surf, the sign of lust's consummation in films of more discreet times. I like the stories inherent on the stage Gall has so purposefully blocked.

Four Ways of Looking is, as I said at the top, a show of excellent painters whose works are enhanced by their interrelationships in this show. The only thing not to like, I thought at the outset, was the title. "Egads! What a dull title, lacking any predictive force," was my initial impression.

I can't say that I've come up with anything better, though. As the reader can see, here are four  distinct ways of looking, but four deeply related points of view. The eye says they are different, but a little study corrects the vision better than glasses ever can.