FERAL FLORA
RECENT PAINTINGS BY JANE ABRAMS
by Peter S. Briggs
During the last decade Jane Abrams has gradually adjusted the saturated, deep impasto of her pensive narratives and dream-like accounts. Thinned paints and glazes now blend the high keyed colors that recurrently breed wildly dense matrices of flora on canvas and paper. Her previously cloaked but unmistakable references to our species—a lone figure, a building, a boat—have now yielded to brilliant, anthropomorphized plants. Barriers, screens, layers, and throngs of zealous foliage replace distant humanity, or in the artist’s words, “…the edges of human resolve.”
The dichotomy between “human” and “nature” that slips off the vernacular tongue serves no end in these paintings. Abrams’ plants are us. She reconstructs our “nature” through the lives of flora. Indeed, what we call “nature” is a characteristically human fabrication. It is a word, a thoughtful and often useful tool that effectively separates our species from other living things. We thrive on such self-reflexive references, on defining our species in contrast to an “other.” (On the contrary, plants do not paint pictures of human beings.) Categories help us to organize the world into discernible and readily understood components. Our thirst for organization, in the face of unquenchable entropy, provides for us some measure of definition, perhaps control, over other living systems.
Abrams’ flora is a visual poetry of that language. She orchestrates pigments on canvas and paper, gives them shape and color and texture and light and density so that they begin to look like what we think or want plants to look like. She travels to find them, to mine their exotic characters, to explore their secret places, to discover their beyul, their Shangri-La, and to ultimately fix them on the canvas. It is no accident that many of her paintings are from distant climes. Such journeys and searches, real and poetic, have long occupied human attention and bestowed uncommon insight and knowledge on the traveler. We seek out the arcane and secreted to clarify our identity and then recreate it for others not able to make the trip.
Abrams’ roaming gaze covets density. Heaving concentrations of flora in her paintings echo the urban intensity of Shanghai, Jakarta, and São Paulo. But, more importantly, Abrams’ exotic flora flaunts human emotion, sexuality, and passion. Prodigal teenagers posturing to impress with their exquisite readiness and fecund promise saturate her canvases. There is no portent of aging in her ripe flora. Even without us in the picture, she summons an elemental human fantasy: to achieve a fixed state of percolating youthfulness.
Tangles of flora shield the path into Abrams’ pubescent universe. At times the panoply is impenetrable. Open space is obstructed. Even in her paintings of ponds, the water, an element of sustenance for her lilies, forms an oxygen-depleted barrier. As we move up Abrams’ canvases from bottom to top, cracks widen, spaces open a bit, touches of blue suggest gasps of air, and less-crowded avenues penetrate her abundant foliage. But flora stands guard. In several paradigmatic works, Beyul and Lata for example, two of her most recent paintings, access beyond the immediate space seems increasingly improbable.
Abrams’ labyrinths of plants deflect attention from any one thing. There is no center, no focal point. The pulsating density of the flora is like a subway station at rush hour or a doggedly overstuffed room: inertia, simplicity, and calm are not well rewarded. Energy, ambiguity, and pandemonium are. This vital environment owes its being to Abrams’ hand extended toward and touching a canvas or sheet of paper with pigment. And it owes its meaningfulness, its poetry, to our animal ability to combine images and words in order to explain the world. Sap does not course through the veins of Abrams’ plants. It is human blood.
Peter S. Briggs
Helen DeVitt Jones Curator of Art
Museum of Texas Tech University
©Peter S. Briggs. All rights reserved.
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Sunday, January 25, 2009
Abrams' Flora Yields Secrets
By Wesley Pulkka
For the Journal
The first time I visited Jane Abrams' North Valley studio, I was treated to an array of potted flowers and herbs, apothecary jars on shelves, paintings and drawings scattered about in what I was convinced was an alchemist's secret laboratory.
Abrams' solo show titled "Feral Flora" at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History reflects and blends her interest in plants for medicinal and aesthetic purposes with her impressive skills as an artist. The exhibition consists of several large-scale mural paintings and a handful of small woodcarvings.
Abrams is a natural artist who moves seamlessly among mediums. Her paintings and carvings are cut from the same stylistic bolt of cloth and share a common source of content.
The subjects of Abrams' art spring from her complex life experiences as a now-retired college art professor at the University of New Mexico, world traveler including Central America and Asia and her keen attunement to the living Earth, human politics, spirituality and our collective relationship with the universe.
Some of her works are self-referential, like her "Self Portrait," a bas relief carving depicting Abrams suffering one wound for every year she spent at UNM.
On a lighter note, Abrams' "Duranes Pond" is covered in pastel-colored water lilies that form an almost musical horizontal movement across the vast 64- by 80-inch surface. The sunny color, rippled surface and underwater layers work together to form a spiritually uplifting atmosphere.
Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh would have been pleased with Abrams' "Duranes Pond" because it bridges both of their styles and echoes their appreciation for natural forms and light. Even Abrams' energetic brushwork in the background has links to Van Gogh's intuitive understanding of the Einsteinian relationship between energy and matter.
Catalog essayist Peter S. Briggs did a nice job exploring the anthropomorphic aspects of Abrams' plant forms, so I won't expand on that line of reasoning.
I also see a kinship between Abrams' breathless compulsion for detail and her travels in India that put her in direct contact with Hindu and Buddhist architecture, sacred art and religious philosophies. These paintings are affirmations of American Indian beliefs in the inseparable interconnectedness of all life forms and the Hindu view that essence of God is in everything as the moon's reflection is in every drop of midnight dew.
Abrams' travel in the tropics of Central America gave her an understanding of the chaos and order found in raw living matter. The writhing vines, slithering serpents, aggressive jaguars and screeching monkeys represent some of the turmoil found in the life begetting life cacophony of the rain forest.
Through works like "Lata/Rakta" from 2008, Abrams echoes her tropical voice by producing harmonic balance and a sense of order out of apparent randomness. There is a firm abstract design created by the positioning of stems and leaves that carry the eye through all of Abrams' compositions.
What appears to be stochastic mark making is actually the result of a series of choices as to placement, shape, color intensity, hue and classical aesthetics. Abrams did not arrange these plants in a vase like her 19th-century counterparts might have done, but once at the easel she did take control of the canvas in front of her.
The largest painting is "Beyul" from 2008, at 58 by 104 inches. It is a close-up view of leafy fronds covering the surface of a hidden ground. Through its density this mural alludes to hidden secrets and the possibility of intriguing discoveries if only those feral plants hadn't been so successful at covering everything.
"Feral Flora" is one of Abrams' best local shows to date and truly celebrates the talent and intelligence of a postmodernist realist. I wish the show was larger to include more pieces. On the other hand, every good performer knows it's best to leave your audience wanting more.
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