Bending Rules, Blending Worlds:
Artist Selena Engelhart Creates New Cosmologies for a New Age
by Richard Speer
Art Critic, ARTnews, Art Ltd., Willamette Week (Portland, Oregon); contributor, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Opera News, The Sacramento News & Review
(SANTA FE, New Mexico) -- Blending worlds, conjuring visions of spirits past and present, painter Selena Engelhart creates works of art that crackle with synergy. Pagan and Christian, Latino and Native American, material and other-worldly, human and bestial-- these are the worlds she manages, somehow, to integrate on the canvas. The very titles of her works betray a polymorphous sensitivity: Owl Women... Antler Woman... Fire Hydrant Dress... Selena gives birth to cosmoses in which Mayan gods, Native American kachinas, and Catholic icons mingle and make magic. By turns, her paintings enchant, seduce, and frighten us, connecting us with the primal within and the sublime without.Growing up in Berkeley, California, during the tumultuous 1960s, the daughter of a jazz-pianist father and political-activist mother, Selena showed an early aptitude for both music and art. As a child she studied classical piano, but as she now remembers, "I wasn't a good performing artist. I would get stage fright, have memory blackouts at the piano." Luckily, the more interior experience of painting also came naturally. Although she began drawing and painting in nursery school, her genesis as a serious artist came in her early twenties, in the aftermath of a profound experience she describes as shamanistic. "It was a catalyst for bringing out something that was already inside me," she says. "Like all shamanistic experiences, it was really about the shattering of the ego. It was as if the gods were whipping me to the ground, until all that was left to me was this one pinpoint solar plexus of light. Afterwards, I couldn't bear any intensive stimulation -- intense music, intense conversation -- so I started painting watercolors as a catharsis, to find a way to organize my thoughts and put myself back together. I began painting the universe in abstraction, almost as if you were looking into a microscope. Then I painted gods, Mayan gods from glyphs I was familiar with from my studies, and from living in Mexico when I was nineteen and twenty. And then finally I arrived at painting fetuses, then the human body. So it was really an evolution. During that one year alone, I did 63 paintings."
To refine her technique and develop her unique voice as an artist, Selena traveled the world, studying painting in Florence, Italy, and in the ateliers of New York and San Francisco Bay Area. One teacher who left an especially lasting impression on the young painter was the abstract expressionist Louise Smith, who, along with contemporaries Elmer Bishoff and Richard Diebenkorn was influential in bridging modernism and post-modernism. Selena studied three years with Smith while doing undergraduate work at the College of Arts and Crafts. Another mentor was Franklin Williams, with whom she studied both as an undergraduate and while earning a Masters of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland. "Franklin Williams really freed me up to see myself, to see who I really was. He allowed me to step inside my painting."
Selena's artistic reach broadened in succeeding years, even as her subject matter became almost monomaniacally focused: the exhaustive, yet inexhaustibly inventive, variations on dresses... the series in homage to the American buffalo... the studies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She is on a quest, it would seem, to discover universals within concretes. Tellingly, one of her recent solo exhibitions was titled "Cosmology."
Selena (right) in her Santa Fe studio with her beloved aunt, Tia Estrella
Today, in the high desert of New Mexico, Selena continues her cosmological explorations, the tranquility of her Santa Fe studio belying the churning, phantasmagoric visions which travel from her soul into the paint brush. "Santa Fe has made me much stronger as a person, because it has enabled me to go inside myself. When you're out here in the desert, the rest of the world melts away. The elements here are strong. The sun is more harsh than nurturing, and there's a sense of isolation from the outside world -- very different from Berkeley, which is so worldly and diverse. But living and working here have connected me to nature in a powerful way. I live close to a mountain, and every week I go into the wilderness with my dog, Luna. I came to Santa Fe on impulse, and it was hard at first, but I've learned from it."
Detail, Night Buffalo, 1997. Oil on canvas, 11" x 14".
Look closely at many of Selena's canvases and you will see within the application of paint itself the drama of her inner world. Like waves of oil, the brushstrokes swell, crest, and fall, the paint gloppily luxuriant in a way that recalls another artist whose inner drama draws us in, Vincent Van Gogh.Selena's is a world of icons--visual shorthand for larger abstractions: crucifixes and cathedrals, skulls, moons, and antique dresses in whose folds the ghosts of former wearers linger. There is something of the cave-painting or petroglyph in the iconic symbols she coaxes from the oils, as if these images, although never before rendered quite this way, have been with us for thousands of years. They speak to us in silence.
It is important to note, however, that for all her embracing of iconography, Selena Engelhart is an iconoclast. Disregarding religious and artistic convention, unafraid of radical reinterpretation, she sees the Virgin of Guadalupe in an ear of corn, an ancient buffalo inside a woman's belly. Like two of the painters who influenced her as an art student in New York, Willem De Kooning and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Selena brings us works that are beautiful but not "pretty" in the traditional realist sense. No one will mistake her elemental buffalos for the pastorales churned out by today's retro-Remingtons, who have turned "Southwest Art" into an epithet. In the primitivist tradition, Selena sometimes distresses surface, dragging rusty nails across fresh paint, for example, to imbue her already three-dimensional works with even more texture.
Her modus operandi is dialectic in the sense of obliterating established dichotomies, representation and abstraction foremost among them. This would seem a natural orientation for a woman born to a German-Dutch father and a Mexican mother. Perhaps it was this early collision/integration of Teutonic-Protestant and Latin-Catholic paradigms that created in the artist's mind a conception of the universe as cultural mélange and set the stage for the eclecticism typical of her mature work.
To wit, observe in her curvaceous female nudes the way she marries ancient spirituality and modern feminism. Is she recalling the Venus of Willendorf, circa 30,000 B.C., or presaging some Über-Femme yet unborn?
Behold in her Buffalo series the simultaneous power and gentleness she imparts in these ancient grazers.
Consider in her Dress series the unexpected (and unexplainable?) ways in which she turns a mere garment into a channeler for psychic journeys.
In these complexities -- drawn, somehow, from the seeming simplicity of her imagery -- resides the secret of the prodigious artistic output of Selena Engelhart. Its impact hits you viscerally at first, engaging the heart, resonating in the soul. Only later, as you try to deduce the roots of her painting's lingering magnetic pull, does it challenge the intellect. Such is the artist's paradox and power -- and such is her sorcery.
Ghost Dress in a Well, 1997. Oil on canvas, 30" x 30".
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