| By Philip E. Bishop Special to the Sentinel back to home page Harold Garde knows how to let things flow. He starts a line, and it flows into color, and then color pools back into form. In the selection of Garde's work on view at Maitland Art Center, titled "Vessels/Visage," this makes for an exhilarating variety of visual effects. Remarkably, Garde achieves this easy freedom equally in both his paintings in acrylic and his monotype prints. As the title suggests, most of the works revolve around two recurring figures, the human face and the vessel. In a large acrylic painting such as "Yellow Vase," Garde has typically defined face and vessel in opposite terms. The vase is a graceful yellow field of color, while the face is only a few thick, black lines drawn over liquid zones of green and red. Just this one painting is enough to betray Harold Garde's origins in the brash heyday of New York abstract expressionism. Though now based in New Smyrna Beach and Belfast, Maine, Garde grew up in New York City and worked 15 years on Long Island as a designer and art teacher. These were years when William de Kooning's violent gestural figures, Mark Rothko's color fields, and Helen Frankenthaler's ethereal stains and washes defined a confidently American version of modernist abstraction. There are echoes of these painters everywhere in " Yellow Vase" or the ominous "Self-Portrait as Stranger" - the subtle merge of one color with another or the sudden broad swipe of a paint-laden brush. But abstract expressionism is really the setting of Garde's play with these two fundamental shapes of human experience, the face and the vessel. As guest curator Charon Luebbers explains in her catalog essay, Garde's series are often defined by such elemental figures - the chair, the kimono or the human figure, itself. By wedding his fluid abstraction to the figurative, Garde's paintings and prints command a whole set of psychological responses that nonfigurative art can't access. The yawning mow of the grotesque self-portrait, for example, cries in anguished estrangement., a viewer might well conclude. In the still life "Red Platter," the pacific forms a bottle and vases are in tension with the hot vermilion field at the painting's center. This painting may recall Henri Matisse's color experiments, but it's no armchair in which we might rest from a taxing day, as Matisse famously stated the aim of his paintings. The tensions in Garde's technique are summarized in this show's most complex image, "Bottled Woman," which juxtaposes the bust of a woman and a transparent pitcher holding flowers. The pitcher's volume blends back into the bluish-green background, where the layers of over-painting have been rubbed to create subtle mottling. In the foreground though, is the bust of a woman whose high-collared black garment strangles her. The purplish, misshapen visage seems charged by inner turmoil and conflict, represented by irregular patterns and designs in the garment. Both title and image betray the violent feeling that this woman has "bottled up." De Kooning, abstract expressionist painter of banshee women, may be dead, but he's not forgotten. Harold Garde can just as effectively modulate his emotional pitch by choosing different figures. The pastel tranquillity of "With Leaves" derives from its colors and simple organic forms. The pitcher here is a reassuring domestic presence, meeting the simplest of human needs almost as if it were a thing of nature. Garde is less effective when his canvases employ large, relatively flat fields of color. He poses large-scale silhouettes and faces against flat color, so that the visages are in conversation with each other rather than us. In "RE Peat," he toys with that old figure-ground exercise where the figure can be either a face or a vase. But the blank fields of color feel crude and obvious compared with the delicate surfaces of his stronger work. This subtlety may have its greatest effect in Garde's prints, of which eight are done by his "strappo" method. By first applying a layer of gesso to a glass plate and then painting over it, Garde found that he could peel off the dry painting and transfer it to paper or canvas. thus, the strappo technique requires no press, as does conventional monotype printmaking. The 10 monotypes have all the fresh spontaneity of the painting, but on a more intimate scale. Garde's "Blue Vase" achives the meditative restfulness and understatement of something Japanese, and the "visages" are more like the Buddha in repose. Some are wrinkled by small rivulets of flowing paint, as in "3 Dog Night," which seem to be pictures from some psychic X-ray machine. Despite the virtuosity of his abstract techniques, Garde reminds us how essential the figure is in our emotional response to art. If we want to luxuriate in color freed from figuration, we can look right through his simple outlines of visages and vases. But he seems to understand that even such simple shapes can harness the vitality of abstraction and give it a more human face. Philip E. Bishop is professor of humanities at Valencia Community College. back to home page |