The artwork of
Arline Erdrich, critique
Arline Erdrich, critique
Essay by Neil Watson, Former Curator of Contemporary Art, The Norton Gallery, W. Palm Beach Florida
An essential component of being an artist is possessing and continually honing the ability to utilize and maximize the materials at hand. Whether these materials are physical or intellectual is not the issue. It is all the same – grist for the mill. An open paint can falls off a ladder and leaves in its messy wake splashed on the wall, the unmistakable image of a wolf. It is not a Rorschack wolf, but rather the picture of a very recognizable canine. Erdrich does not immediately seize onto this image like a life raft, and proclaim, “At last I have an icon!” The image seeps in slowly. It percolates. It floats to the surface of her consciousness until, at last, she is ready to claim it as something she can use in her expanding personal iconography. It has visual interest and integrity. It resonates.
It takes a skilled pair of hands and the disciplined mind of a committed artist who has learned all that is needed and then stripped away all that is unnecessary to leave only the essence. As always Erdrich is involved in the push-pull of life. Seeming contradictions merge; dichotomies, rubbing shoulders, give us light to read by. Totems are both simple and deep: They complicate and clarify.
Though Erdrich’s most apparent debt is to the abstract expressionists, there are unconscious echoes of the more recent works of Frank Stella. Forms fly off the canvas, as if the paintings themselves are in the process of exploding. The gestural figures sometimes recall Susan Rothenberg’s horses; the palette is reminiscent of the rich naturalistic tones of early Renaissance Italian frescoes.
Some of the strongest cues in Erdrich’s painterly dance bring to mind Jackson Pollock’s works from the early 1940s, which preceded his signature drip technique. Such Pollock canvases as “The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,” completed in 1943, share certain compositional strategies as well as reliance on pictographic symbols. This …attests to the ongoing dialogue between the artist and the groundbreakers before her.
Erdrich’s methodology is a hybrid mixture of strong, straight-ahead painting and a lesser known paint transfer technique first implemented by the Dada movement in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Erdrich has modified this method by transferring sheets of painted plastic onto her canvases and made it her own, dubbing the process Acryllage©: Optimizing the balance of control and chance. The process allows her to superimpose these pieces of paint-laden plastic and position them in the precise spot she wants. Layer by layer, she creates the exact desired effect. Bits of information seep in and rise to the surface. Recognizable images begin to emerge, like long suppressed memories.
What Erdrich has accomplished, in the sometimes painful integration of art and life, is the unrelenting search of elusive answers. Mythic figures wage war with mortal fears. Heroicism is cast in classical lines. The outcome is not the issue: the brave act of battle is the point.
An essential component of being an artist is possessing and continually honing the ability to utilize and maximize the materials at hand. Whether these materials are physical or intellectual is not the issue. It is all the same – grist for the mill. An open paint can falls off a ladder and leaves in its messy wake splashed on the wall, the unmistakable image of a wolf. It is not a Rorschack wolf, but rather the picture of a very recognizable canine. Erdrich does not immediately seize onto this image like a life raft, and proclaim, “At last I have an icon!” The image seeps in slowly. It percolates. It floats to the surface of her consciousness until, at last, she is ready to claim it as something she can use in her expanding personal iconography. It has visual interest and integrity. It resonates.
It takes a skilled pair of hands and the disciplined mind of a committed artist who has learned all that is needed and then stripped away all that is unnecessary to leave only the essence. As always Erdrich is involved in the push-pull of life. Seeming contradictions merge; dichotomies, rubbing shoulders, give us light to read by. Totems are both simple and deep: They complicate and clarify.
Though Erdrich’s most apparent debt is to the abstract expressionists, there are unconscious echoes of the more recent works of Frank Stella. Forms fly off the canvas, as if the paintings themselves are in the process of exploding. The gestural figures sometimes recall Susan Rothenberg’s horses; the palette is reminiscent of the rich naturalistic tones of early Renaissance Italian frescoes.
Some of the strongest cues in Erdrich’s painterly dance bring to mind Jackson Pollock’s works from the early 1940s, which preceded his signature drip technique. Such Pollock canvases as “The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle,” completed in 1943, share certain compositional strategies as well as reliance on pictographic symbols. This …attests to the ongoing dialogue between the artist and the groundbreakers before her.
Erdrich’s methodology is a hybrid mixture of strong, straight-ahead painting and a lesser known paint transfer technique first implemented by the Dada movement in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Erdrich has modified this method by transferring sheets of painted plastic onto her canvases and made it her own, dubbing the process Acryllage©: Optimizing the balance of control and chance. The process allows her to superimpose these pieces of paint-laden plastic and position them in the precise spot she wants. Layer by layer, she creates the exact desired effect. Bits of information seep in and rise to the surface. Recognizable images begin to emerge, like long suppressed memories.
What Erdrich has accomplished, in the sometimes painful integration of art and life, is the unrelenting search of elusive answers. Mythic figures wage war with mortal fears. Heroicism is cast in classical lines. The outcome is not the issue: the brave act of battle is the point.