THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702220049
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 102 lines
AS SEEN in her retrospective on view at The Arts Center of the Portsmouth Museums, artist E. Ann Stokes has built a body of work over 45 years that embraces maternal bliss, balance and a modernist's disdain for copying nature.
A native of Portsmouth, Stokes is a retired supervisor of art for Portsmouth Public Schools. After completing her art education degree at Longwood College in 1942, she came home and talked a Portsmouth schools official into letting her pilot an art curriculum. That's how she became the school system's first art teacher.
Because she was teaching and raising a family, she put her own art career on hold. And while she has regularly been included in group shows in the region, it's been nearly 30 years since her previous solo exhibition.
But regret doesn't emanate from her paintings and sculpture. Her joie de vivre is evident in every splashy, buttery stroke, and in her choice of colors - often bold and bright, but running also into the shadowy side of blue and gray.
An artist risks being trite by mining the sunny side. Painter Marc Chagall offers one successful example of romantic sentiment being handled delightfully, but not superficially. Even still, expressing the more upbeat emotions in art has gotten a bad rap.
Stokes has bravely waltzed into this territory, often to pleasing effect.
The retrospective begins, and truly extends from, a 1950 painting that Stokes made about a year after the birth of her first child. Called ``Matrix,'' the painting reveals Picasso's influence in the cubistic split of the mother's face; one side is a porcelain-skinned madonna, and the other side is a brown-skinned woman - perhaps an admission of her earthier side coming forward as she moves into motherhood.
Stokes has said that the painting had a cathartic effect on her. Before she made ``Matrix,'' she felt nearly obsessive in her attachment to her infant son. The making of that painting helped her let go a little, and relax. It almost seemed to heal her, as inner-directed art often does.
In ``Matrix,'' the mother figure forms an oval with the infant, cradled in her arms. Rainbow colors radiate from the two, like an aura of joyous energy. The large painting is very heavily textured in areas.
These characteristics are found in Stokes' later work. The ovoid madonna and child became a circle, emerging in many forms - from the flat, colored discs in ``Caution'' to a sand-textured form melting into an oceanic atmosphere in ``Rip Tide.''
Stokes has said she identifies with the circle, as a symbol of femininity and the Moon, and for its connotations of circles of family and friends. She's a warm, embracing person, so she actually sees herself as a circle interlocking with other circles.
As ever-present as Stokes' circles are her grids - both outright grids, as in ``Clones,'' and subtler ones defined by a network of runny paint drips, such as ``Glacier Gaze.''
She seems naturally inclined to balance strong forms with softer ones, and to pair complementary colors - the yin with the yang. One can see Hans Hofmann's push-pull theory coming into play, with strong shapes in bright and dark colors set against an exuberant background of loose paint. And there are suggestions of Jasper Johns' flag paintings.
But Stokes said her true mentor was Norfolk painter Norman Goodwin, with whom she studied for a decade from the 1970s into the 1980s. From Goodwin, she gained the courage to go with the flow while painting. She learned to listen to the painting, and let it show her where it needed to go - a true inner journey, connecting with the creative unconscious mind.
Her 1988 ``Undulant Strata,'' a splashy watercolor that loosely describes an architectural facade, particularly shows Goodwin's painterly influence. His impact also might be traceable in ``City Sandwich,'' a more naturalistic but still very loose watercolor rendering of a High Street scene viewed from outside the 1846 Courthouse where her show is on exhibit.
Careful and carefree layers of underpainting and glazing give the surfaces of her paintings a rich shimmer, grounded by heavy, matte areas of sand-encrusted paint.
One of her most affecting images is ``Rip Tide,'' a twilight image of choppy seas and darkening skies. The abstract image was inspired by a childhood memory of being taken out to sea by a heavy current, unable to swim to shore on her own.
Only in that piece does the circle break, crack open like an egg and start to spill into the sea. For that one brief moment, the circle lost its wholeness.
More art teachers on exhibit: Some 100 artworks by the region's art teachers are on display in the ``12th Annual Tidewater Virginia Art Education Association Juried Exhibition.'' The show is up through Friday at WHRO, our public radio and television broadcasters at 5200 Hampton Blvd., Norfolk. Just stop by the receptionist's desk, and they'll direct you to the hallway exhibit. Many of these artists are highly accomplished in the areas they teach, whether painting, sculpting or printmaking. These works can be seen weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Call 889-9400 or 441-2901. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
``City Sandwich,'' a 1974 work by E. Ann Stokes, is part of the
retrospective at The Arts Center of the Portsmouth Museums.
Graphic
WANT TO GO?
What: ``E. Ann Stokes: A Retrospective''
Where: The Arts Center of the Portsmouth Museums, 420 High St.
When: Through March 9
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m.
Sunday
How much: $1
Call: 393-8983
Lecture: Stokes will give a free talk, with artist Norman
Goodwin, at 2 p.m. March 2 at the center.