Comment on this story What: Works by Jean Hess and Mira Gerard When: Thru Nov. 12, with an opening reception Oct. 8, 5:30-8 p.m. Where: Hanson Gallery, 5607 Kingston Pike (call 584-6097 for information)

Two artists explore varying visual terrain

by Heather Joyner Spica

Most of the time, making visual art is a private activity. When we listen to a recording of John Coltrane playing the sax or watch Gene Kelly leaping through the air on film, we are in that moment—or at least within the illusion of that moment. Looking at fine art, we are instead confronted with the product of many unknown moments. In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno wrote, “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.” However, there is often little tangible evidence of what goes into that saying or thinking in terms of the artist’s process. And one can argue that that’s how it should be, that a work of art should stand alone. But the steps a painter takes toward his or her results are inextricable from the piece itself, whether or not they’re acknowledged.

Together, Mira Gerard and Jean Hess have works on view at the Hanson Gallery beginning Oct. 8. Both are artists who honor process, and they arrive at their paintings using complex, frequently subtractive methods. Whereas Gerard sometimes lays down pigment that she later sands off, Hess creates layer upon layer, “...often loading dissonant elements onto the surface [so that I can] ‘resolve’ each step.” She says, “I typically put a lot of detailed information on the canvas in the beginning, and then gradually cover most of it over.” Either way, each artist follows the path that will take her where she intends to go.

The current show features a series of female nudes by Gerard and somewhat more abstract works by Hess, all varied in size. Although Gerard’s canvases explore traditional “subject matter,” they are not about women, per se. “I am fascinated by anything that implies or suggests the presence of something important without necessarily revealing anything literal,” she says. “Part of the mystery and alchemy of painting is that an image can become so much more than its literal depiction.”

Raised in rural New Hampshire, Gerard has been a professor of painting at ETSU since 2001. Her oil on linen piece titled “Bhakta” includes a woman’s serene face above bare breasts, a large moth hovering in front of the figure’s uplifted palm. The painting is certainly not without symbolic undercurrents, even if Gerard’s moth was introduced via unexpected circumstances (specifically, because she chose to light her models outdoors at night, attracting insects). But the artist’s essential motivation is the paint itself—the visceral presence of form within space without any discernable context.

When Gerard says, “a scratch or surface abrasion can become a mark of perfection and intense beauty,” she means it. The lush emptiness of her small canvas titled “Heart of Darkness” is marred by an occasional stray hair from her brush, lending the piece an emotional tone beyond narrative. Needless to say, Gerard’s human forms must be convincingly rendered to avoid distraction from the whole; in this regard—be it in “Pele’s Storm” or “The Secret Sea”—she more or less succeeds.

Originally from Maryland (with an advanced education in cultural anthropology from the University of New Mexico), Hess is a marketing research consultant, doing work that requires a detail-mindedness found in her approach to painting. For instance, she launches each ethereal piece with elements far less happenstance than Gerard’s moth, detailed in copious notes and sketches that are a wonder to behold. In the end, when earlier stages have been obscured, the maps and grids, pressed leaves and flowers, and other things Hess begins with matter more to her than they do to us, but they are an integral part of her art’s making.

“I like to work in incremental and meticulous gestures,” Hess says. “I am tending toward smaller and smaller work. My favorite way to paint is on a tabletop—I am always happiest in that relationship to the surface—while the ‘painting wall’ must always be re-negotiated and tolerated. Perhaps because it [involves] an even larger white blank than the canvas.” Instead, she creates scaled-down pieces with resins and suspended pigment adding depth and luminosity. “More than anything else, the trapping of light is a metaphor for the whole process I’m engaged in. It is a way of signaling that the goal is the sublime, whatever the outcome,” she explains, adding that even if initial layers have been buried, “[their] presence makes the surface much more dynamic and seductive...by ‘seductive,’ I really mean beautiful or visually arresting.”

Indeed, Hess’ newer paintings at the Hanson Gallery possess the intense kind of beauty Gerard refers to. The artist’s smallest works—what she calls “specimens”—employ “a vocabulary of flora, chroma, light and atmosphere [that expresses] my idea of a sublime place, or Eden.”

Hess’ “documents,” unlike her equally enticing specimens and “environments” (i.e., “Celestial Pool”), utilize a kind of frame-within-a-frame device that directs viewers from the interior outward. The central image in each piece is a comparatively sharp miniature landscape that looks superimposed upon an expanded, more shadowy version of the same general scene. Surrounding that “box” is the painting’s outer portion, always with plant material serving to magnify or act as a sort of distillation of the innermost section. Grander pieces—like a triptych with waterscapes previously exhibited at Nashville’s airport—are, as Hess puts it, “more kinesthetic...meant to engage the whole body.”

With Gerard and Hess, whether the body is subject or subjected to, we are presented with the creative act as well as the pieces themselves. And that’s tremendously satisfying.

October 7, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 41 © 2004 Metro Pulse