Elemental Portraits
A review of “New Works,” a solo show of ten oil on copper paintings by Erin Anderson at Sirona Fine Art in Hallandale Beach, Florida, and running from January 6th through March 6th, 2018.
Each of Anderson’s paintings in her solo show, “New Works,” could be laid out side-by-side to form a glowing Periodic Table of sorts. Such is each painting’s idiosyncratic purpose, and the interwoven, gleaming copper currents which sinuously unite them as a series. Her paintings evoke the elements not solely as organic substance (in contrasting textures) or personification (implied by waving, wild hair or flashing eyes), but overtly in her use of these copper backgrounds, a hallmark largely distinguishing her works. But it’s this exhibition at Sirona Fine Art that most poetically and satisfyingly intertwines Anderson’s subjects and backgrounds to yield her most richly symbolic works yet.
Technically, Anderson achieves something few contemporary representational artists achieve: the paintings stand resolutely alone as paintings, and not simply as unsophisticated copies of a photograph. Myriad layers of thin oil glazes mimic the translucent glow of pulsing skin. Rendering has evolved from the painterly to the flawless, but without the flattening-out sometimes unavoidable when working from photo references. The copper backgrounds could never leap from a lens, as they exist as the visceral and unabashed manipulation of a mineral. The copper forms abstracted forests, waterfalls, and skies behind the subjects. Its razor-edged lines and nebulous splotches of acid recall the itch of nettles and the dissipation of stormy clouds, and Anderson’s subjects exist within the copper’s moody, panoramic landscape.
Embedded in this landscape, these women subjects are resolutely of the earth — and more frankly, of our own identity upon it. This is the substrate beneath any and all elements of this series, which portrays, commends, and peruses only women. Anderson’s past works included men, and have done so with gravitas, candor, and affection. However, this series presents us with a neat table of rectangles celebrating both women and the universality of their identities beyond gender. As two letters designate most elements in the Periodic Table, Anderson’s titles designate each subject. The titles encapsulate each subject’s greater psyche, one which the viewer imagines she may not necessarily print onto a business card, but rather which has followed her throughout her whole life.
For this series of women subjects, Anderson’s copper delivers a symbolic masterstroke. Remember that copper is a material utilized in a specific type of female contraceptive device due to how its molecular makeup interacts uniquely with female hormones. However, copper is more broadly known as constantly tarnishing. As it evolves into verdigris, the lustrous tones revert back to the dark greens of the earth. As the relationship between subject and copper background acknowledges the process of tarnishing, it recalls the adage “from ashes to ashes.” The subject was formed in the background and she will return to it after death. Perhaps, in the women-only context of these paintings, the subject is formed in the womb of the background and simultaneously carries that womb within her.
The most poignant of these paintings is The MD. For all the indisputable individuality of Anderson’s own aesthetic, The MD recalls most the influence of another artist. Julia Margaret Cameron was a nineteenth century English photographer who saturated her oeuvre with the dreamlike and pensive. The MD’s detached, otherworldly state of contemplation speaks to Cameron’s subjects. Though lucidly rendered in contrast to Cameron’s fading figures, the acid in the copper implies Cameron’s ethereal atmosphere, this corner of a long-lost garden, not merely in Cameron’s misty Victorian countrysides but rather by harking back to the ashes and earth from which Anderson’s subjects have been born.
Undeniably, Anderson renders and paints with a verisimilitude uncommon in today’s art world. Despite how her works enrapture the viewer with their precision and luminosity, symbolic eminence heightens this series of paintings. Julia Margaret Cameron wrote that “ … In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.” By melding together innate identity and transient copper, Anderson proves to be an ardent conduit for these elemental portraits of women.
