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ann gale
Jan 2008 by richard speer
Aficionados
of portraiture tend to divide the genre into opposing camps,
of Romanticism versus Naturalism. Among contemporary
portraitists, Seattle-based painter Ann Gale falls somewhere
in the middle of this continuum, as eight of her elegantly
moody portraits demonstrate in the Portland Art Museum’s
ongoing APEX series. Gale paints the kind of visages and
physiognomies you might expect to see beneath Seattle’s heavy
gray skies: ashen, Zoloft-ready men and women hunched before
muted, putty-colored backgrounds—and yet the artist enlivens
her subjects via twinkly, impressionistic brushstrokes that
pop and recede with Hofmann-like push/pull. This is Gale’s
viewpoint and paradox: a scintillating technique deployed in
the service of an enervating sense of desolation.
Born
in 1966, Gale, whose mother is also an artist, grew up in
Rhode Island and began painting around age 7. “I was obsessed
with painting people,” she recalls. “I used to love football
season, because my father would sit very, very still.” In her
undergraduate studies at Rhode Island College and graduate
work at Yale, even as she studied printmaking and sculpture,
she found herself returning to painting, still fascinated by
“that thing about a person’s face that sticks with you, to the
point that you’re still thinking about it later.” After Yale
she exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco and
Seattle, where she eventually accepted a teaching position at
the University of Washington School of Art. Currently she is
on sabbatical, painting full-time thanks to a Guggenheim
Fellowship she was awarded last year. The APEX show is her
first solo outing in a museum.
It is not a stretch to
call Gale’s studio practice extreme. Over a period ranging
from three months to two years (!), she sits with her subjects
in claustrophobic proximity, staring them down, sometimes
putting in earplugs and ignoring them “if they get too gabby.”
Once she painted her husband reclining in a full bathtub. The
transition of warm water to lukewarm to cold is evinced in his
expression, which is not that of a happy camper. The artist,
however, is not interested in the chipper personae her
subjects don for the world-at-large but in deeper, dourer
selves that more honestly express the physical and psychic
depreciations that accrue over time. The themes that preoccupy
her are not human efficacy or effervescence but obsolescence
and ennui, manifested in the slouched shoulders of
Rachel (2007), the sad-sack eyes of Gary with Dark
Wall (2004); awkwardly positioned genitalia in
Gary; worry lines and nasolabial folds in
Self-Portrait with Blue Stripes; and sagging breasts
and belly fat in Babs with Ribbons.
As
emotionally and existentially loaded as these works are, it
would be inaccurate to peg Gale simply as a psychological
portraitist, intent on journalistically mapping the contours
of a model’s soul. Rather, she pivots between a trio of
sometimes conflicting directives: externalizing the subject’s
inner life; dispassionately recording the shifting qualities
of light and shadow over the course of a session; and allowing
her impressions and memories to lend their own, Proustian
subtexts. “I start off trying to figure out what’s going on
with the person in front of me,” she explains, “but then maybe
the light starts to bring out a memory or emotion or something
about myself that I can’t escape, and it all starts to get
tangled up.”
When the painting is finished, the images
do not always resemble their subjects in the standard realist
sense—which suits the artist just fine. “Likeness doesn’t
drive the work at this point; accuracy does,” she explains.
“But it’s not accuracy to the model; it’s accuracy to my
perception, and that’s a very different
thing.”
“Apex: Ann Gale” remains on view at the
Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave., from October 13,
2007–February 10, 2008. (503) 226-2811
www.portlandartmuseum.org
She will be represented with
a solo show at Hackett-Freedman Gallery, in San Francisco,
from March 6–April 28, 2008. 250 Sutter St., S.F. (415)
362-7152 www.hackettfreedman.com
Jan 2008 by richard speer
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