|
Southwest Art, April 2006
Of Place and Time
Betsy Bauer's layered paintings and collages capture the rhythms of a
place"
By Dottie Indyke
"The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place," Barry Lopez,
the esteemed nature writer, opined in a 1997 essay. "If you open
yourself up, you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy may come a
sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe."
Personal relationship with place exists at the heart of Betsy Bauer's
artwork, and two places in particular, which are the very opposites of
one another in mood and palette. In Italy, she draws inspiration from
the spirit and intrigue of ruins that connect contemporary humans with
their ancient counterparts, from the sweeping drama of opera, and the
rolling, cypress-accented hills that overflow with olives, lemons, and
figs. In her New Mexico home, Bauer, 47, observes the bands of lavender,
pink, and gold that illuminate the evening sky; she studies the patterns
in cracked earth and in datura and yucca; and she wonders at their
ability to bloom so luxuriously in the face of drought and constant sun
with which New Mexicans must contend.
These elements show up in her paintings in literal and metaphorical
ways – as old Italian librettos and antique book pages utilized as
backdrops, as realistic landscapes and botanicals, and in the scratched
layers of paint and glazes she uses to suggest the ravages of time.
A decade ago, the melding of Italy, history, botanicals, and
landscape for which she is best known today first took shape when a
colleague gave Bauer a page from a late 19th-century Italian book. She
began printing and painting directly onto faded opera scores, pages from
gardening-books, and personal letters yellowed with age. Nowadays she
scours antique bookstores for crumbling leather-bound volumes with
handsome typefaces and incorporates astronomical notations from books by
Copernicus that lend her paintings an air of cosmic mystery.
Early on, Bauer concentrated on trees, plants, and flowers,
superimposing ferns, water lilies, and sunflowers on these paper
antiquities and cleverly blending words, or lines of music, with visual
imagery. Influenced by the shape of the letters or the rhythm of the
printed music, she painted with oils, then glazed, to elicit color and
texture. Gradually she expanded to landscapes and added her signature
craquelure frames, which combine a contemporary look with the appearance
of age.
Back in 1976 when she enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art,
Bauer was a passionate surrealist working in the same vein as Salvador
Dali and Rene Magritte. In the college's gallery she met cutting-edge
artists of the era, and she experimented with performance art, combining
the visual with music and theater. "My last year in school, I explored
mark-making," Bauer recalls. "I did a 10-foot mural of tiny little white
brush strokes, like grass lined up in rows, on a black field. It was on
the verge of minimalism."
Seven years later she moved to New Mexico and in this austere area
her urban aesthetic seemed out of place. "New Mexico was such a contrast
to New York City," she says. "In New York, you're lucky if you see a
piece of the sky or a little patch of dirt. In New Mexico, the landscape
is huge but there's also an intimacy. I'm always aware of individual
plants here, maybe because they have to work so hard to live. "
On her first trip to Europe, in 1980, she roamed through France,
Spain, and Italy with a tent and cook stove on her back and gave herself
an art education not offered in school. "Before, I'd been exposed to the
Renaissance only through art history classes," Bauer says. "Going into
cathedrals, seeing art, was very different from looking at slides in a
dark room in Philadelphia."
She has since been back to Italy more than a dozen times, most
recently for a two-year stint with her family. In Strettoia, Bauer, her
partner, and children made wine and picked olives alongside the four
village families. Each day they would help themselves from the abundant
chestnuts, pomegranates, and grapes that grew on the roadside. In the
changing skies she noticed a subtle, watery pale-blueness that was in
stark contrast to the sharpness of the light in New Mexico.
Since her post-art school years, Bauer's career has been on a steady
trajectory. At first she worked as an animator for cartoons, television,
and children's film in New York City. But in New Mexico, though she
visited every graphic designer, animation studio, and television station
in the area, she came up empty. In retrospect, she reflects, her
inability to find work was a blessing. Instead, she improvised and took
a job as a landscaper. For herself, she planted a garden of sweet peas,
love-in-a-mist, and giant sunflowers. This seemingly humble activity
laid the foundation for the art that was to come.
A breakthrough came in 1995 when she took her portfolio of
paintings-on-librettos to the Santa Fe Opera. Ever since, the company
has mass-produced notecards and posters of Bauer's illustrations of
productions from "La Traviata" to "Carmen." Opera, for Bauer, is the
personification of Italian culture, the perfect symbol of its reverence
for the past. Her 2006 rendition of "The Magic Flute," which will be
performed as part of the Santa Fe Opera's 50th anniversary season, is an
evocative depiction in pale pinks and greens of a sparse desert
landscape that represents the mythical Egyptian palm groves of the opera
story. A summer show of her work at Hahn Ross Contemporary Fine Art in
Santa Fe coincides with the opening of the opera.
Bauer's paintings, which have been exhibited at the National Academy
of Sciences and in galleries in Santa Fe, New York, and Washington, DC,
are collected by museums, major corporations, and government agencies,
from American Express to Hallmark, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and
the State Department, which has placed her work in U.S. embassies in
Sarajevo, Bosnia, and La Paz, Bolivia. Bauer is perpetually
experimenting – with printmaking, drawing, and collage, with a range of
materials and degrees of abstraction. She describes printmaking as
analogous to planting seeds and painting as a way of digging deep into
the earth.
"Printmaking really informs the process of painting for me. With
painting, I can focus on one idea. For example, in a landscape, how the
color of the sky is an influence or how the mountains are far away," she
says.
Lately she has been leaning toward a looser style that revolves less
around detail and more on dominant, color-filled skies. "I'm always
pulled between abstraction and realism," she confesses. "The paintings I
most like to look at are abstract because I love the physicality of
painting itself. I try to work abstractly, but I'm not quite there.
Realism always creeps into my work."
With the adoption of two daughters from Calcutta, Bauer has found
Indian symbology creeping into her work; her exhaustive collection of
Italian antique and art books has expanded to include similar volumes
from the South Asian subcontinent. "I've spent years looking at old
Indian miniatures," Bauer says. "The Mughal Court particularly interests
me. These are paintings done in the 1500s and 1600s, around the
Renaissance era, by artisans commissioned by emperors. I love their
intimacy, color, and age, and the way they stylize plants. I'm inspired
by tiny pieces of these paintings – primarily the landscape, trees, and
animals."
A recent extended stay in England has also had a significant impact.
Bauer became closely acquainted with a rural village in Kent, including
its pub, church, and village green. Every day she walked through the
sheep fields and along the footpaths, past a glassy pond. Through the
seasons, she noticed the varied hues of the leaves, the reflections of
water on sky and land, and the color shifts that came with the passing
mist. She was amazed by the infinite shades of gray in the atmosphere.
When she returned home she made "Sunrise River," a pastoral scene of a
meandering stream, flanked by placid banks, stately trees, and a mellow
pink-blue sky, from which emerges the curlicued calligraphy from a page
in an old English botanical book. The painting may signal Bauer's entry
into a new, impressionistic stage of her career.
While the landscapes of Italy remain her central subject, bits and
pieces of these other places play supporting roles – the cagey animals
of India, the evanescent countryside of England, and the dazzling
harshness of New Mexico, where Bauer has lived for nearly two decades.
Her studio provides the perfect aerie from which to view the local
landscape. Located 10 miles south of Santa Fe at the foot of Piedra
Negra Mountain, the two-story building has a loft offering an eastern
panorama that frames the pinon-covered hills like a painting straight
from nature. In the opposite direction, the view is of an undulating
adobe carpet abruptly curbed by a semicircle of mountain ranges. On a
clear day, Bauer can see all the way to Mt. Taylor and the Arizona
border.
"The layering of old calligraphy and music gives a sense of history,
mystery, and a link to the past," she says of her work. "I think the
paintings are similar to travel – romantic travel – with a sense of
discovery. Travelers lose the outer layer of themselves and begin to
rediscover what makes them passionate about life."
Dottie Indyke is the Santa Fe correspondent for ARTnews, a columnist
for the Albuquerque Journal, and a contributor to Sculpture and Santa
Fean magazines.
Bauer is represented by Hahn Ross Contemporary Fine Art, Santa Fe,
NM; Sears Peyton Gallery, New York, NY; Addison Ripley Fine Art,
Washington, DC; Weber/Winfield at Winfield Gallery, Carmel, CA; and
www.betsybauer.com.
back to top
|
Click page images to see larger version |
