
DATE: Sunday, June 1, 1997                  TAG: 9705300090

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  157 lines

RAW VISIONS LACK OF FORMAL TRAINING DOESN'T PREVENT THE ARTISTS IN A WILLIAMSBURG EXHIBITION FROM BARING THEIR TORMENTED SOULS

OUTSIDE A Williamsburg folk art museum last week, the propellers of colorful, handmade airplanes twirled in gleeful anticipation of a storm.

Vollis Simpson's whirligig planes had been set on high poles in a courtyard garden at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, where an exhibit called ``Flying Free'' recently went on view.

Inside, the flight proved to be from within.

The show consists of 130 pieces selected from a major collection of late 20th century American folk art amassed by Ellin and Baron Gordon of Williamsburg.

The exhibit catalog includes a short biography on each of the 78 artists - nine of whom are Virginians, three of them local - plus some discussion of the circumstances that led them to create.

A sampler:

Herbert Singleton's ``The House of David,'' is a painted bas-relief sculpture carved from a discarded door. The New Orleans artist's Biblical narrative features estrangement and violence; it can be seen as a metaphor for his youth spent as a street tough who landed in jail.

Bessie Harvey is represented by an untitled sculpture made from painted and decorated wood fragments. The Tennessee sculptor struggled to raise her 11 children alone, but fell apart when two sons turned hoodlum. Grief produced visions, and the visions called her to make an art infused with hope - from around 1974 until her death in 1994.

Thornton Dial Sr.'s ``Flying Free (Woman's Head)'' is a dreamy, Picassoid painting from which the show took its title. Dial was raised poor in Alabama, and developed a great respect for women. His work links the plight of women and African-Americans in their shared oppression by a white male-dominated society.

Dial's ethereal woman appears to be a stand-in for the artist. She has transcended her circumstances and become spiritually large; the bird over her head suggests her flight from bodily containment.

Here are works by the insane and the disenfranchised, by white, black and brown people, by city dwellers and country folk, old and young. Most are dealing with some kind of grief, a deep-down sadness that's darker than the usual blues.

Often, their work is a way of climbing out of a hole and into the sunlight.

When these artists put pen to paper, paintbrush to plywood or carving knife to wood, it triggers a wellspring of imagery that arises from the unconscious - or, as psychologist Carl Jung might have argued, from the collective unconscious. Wherever it comes from, these artists seem able to access a kind of wisdom often far exceeding their own formal education.

This is art emerging from an entire person, not just from the neck up. It comes through the gut like a train. It manifests as a strong urge that moves the hand and reveals itself in objects.

But these art pieces are more than the tracks of people who are troubled in mind. They are souvenirs of the raw human soul, and evidence of the soul's ability to heal itself.

Such work is called visionary, outsider, folk or primitive - though none of these labels is sufficient.

Visionary suggests imagery come down from God, or some spiritual source - and that is the way a number of these artists have experienced it. An example is the Rev. Anderson Johnson of Newport News, whose Faith Mission murals depicting Jesus Christ and other religious subjects were saved from the wrecking ball in 1995.

Some are outsider artists as defined by British scholar Roger Cardinal, who coined the term in the early 1970s. Mostly, he was referring to eccentric recluses, spiritual fanatics and psychotics for whom art is a private language challenging the most talented decoders of imagery.

Folk usually means an object was made by the ``common people,'' writes Tom Patterson in his essay for the ``Flying Free'' catalog. True, most of the 78 artists in the show have humble jobs and live in modest homes. But there is nothing ``common'' about their artwork.

The term ``folk'' has usually referred to craft traditions, such as weaving, potting and quilting. In this collection, the message outweighs technique.

Billy Ray Hussey of Robbins, N.C., is represented in the show with a face jug, a venerable Tar Heel craft tradition. Hussey's ceramic jug mug is a blue devil with bugged eyes and horns. It's not unusual to see a devil on a face jug. Also true to tradition, the face somewhat resembles that of the maker.

But in the context of this expressive collection, a viewer may be inclined to ponder why an artist would choose to depict himself as Satan.

Also, O'Tesia Harper of Yazoo City, Miss., has a quilt in the show. Her patriotic themes took a commercial turn when she played off a Coca-Cola slogan with ``Coke Covers the World.''

It seems unlikely Harper was trying to get the corporation's executives to buy her red, white and blue quilt. More likely, Harper was simply refreshing her visual repertoire by responding to her everyday world.

Then there's ``primitive,'' a term that might sound like a put-down if the adjective was applied to you. But it just means self taught.

Here again, not all of these artists lack formal education. Melissa Polhamus of Virginia Beach has a history degree from Virginia Tech, and has worked on Wall Street. New Yorker Helen Salzberg has a graduate business degree from New York University and has taken art courses; she is a wealthy widow with three homes.

So how does Salzberg fit into this group?

In her case, it's pretty clear that the more academic approaches to artmaking did not stick. Her painting, ``Bar Mitzvah Boy,'' is a directly expressive, crude scene no professor could elicit.

On the contrary, mainstream and schooled artists have been taking cues from self-taught artists for decades. These days, it's not so easy to separate the insiders from the outsiders.

Looking at Vollis Simpson's 12-foot-tall ``Bicycle Man,'' whose yellow cut-out figure pumps its arms and legs as the unicycle wheel periodically revolves, it's hard not to think of the renowned mainstream artist Jonathan Borofsky's similar ``Hammering Man.''

That's not to imply that Borofsky was inspired by Simpson, or vice versa. ``Bicycle Man'' was created in 1996, while ``Hammering Man'' first appeared in the late 1970s.

For Borofsky, ``Hammering Man'' was a metaphor for the artist working with his hands. For Simpson, ``Bicycle Man'' would appear to be a symbol for flight.

It's a way to move forward, in any case.

The Gordons have been collecting such works since the late 1970s. From the start, they were inclined toward inventive, provocative pieces rather than sentimental, cutesy folk art.

Baron Gordon grew up in Norfolk in a home marked by a love of literature. Ellin was raised in Westchester County, N.Y., and spent her youth antiquing with her mother and attending arts events in Manhattan.

The couple first began collecting books, Chinese export porcelain and 18th and 19th century folk art. A chance encounter in the late 1960s with an early major folk art collector eventually turned them into major fans of contemporary works by self-taught artists.

The couple's new friend - Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., founder of New York's Museum of American Folk Art - introduced them to key dealers, and shared his knowledge and intense enthusiasm.

``Much of what we have learned from twentieth-century self-taught art and its artists is about drive and obsession and the human spirit. The ability that many of the artists share is the determination to rise above obstacles that most of us would find insurmountable and a philosophy of accepting what is dealt to you and dealing with it,'' Ellin writes in the catalog.

``Seemingly driven, they unabashedly bare their souls, with no veneer to hide behind or to protect them.''

Their motivation is neither cash nor kudos. ``They paint or draw or carve to fulfill personal needs to quiet the demon within.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos

Thornton Dial, Sr. ``Flying Free''

Anderson Johnson, ``Heads of Two Angels''

Denzil Goodpaster, ``Dolly Parton Cane''

Larry McKee, ``Skeleton Cane''

J.T. (``Jake'') McCord, ``Girl with Dog''

Robert Howell, ``Fish''

Photos

ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER FOLK ART CENTER

``Two Stags,'' a painting on plywood by William Lawrence Hawkins.

``Leaping Frog,'' a painted wood carving by Miles Carpenter.