If you tune in to the two-minute Fox public service announcements for "the creative spirit" you've probably seen Surrealist painter Ann Erpino. Current appreciation of the genre is greater than your average sound bite. The photo-reality of computer graphics and a renewed interest in the bizarre and the unconscious mind have refocused attention on surreal art. "Young dyed and pierced liberals like my work," Erpino notes. She won the "Peoples' Choice" award at the '98 Taste of Chico festival.
Surrealism conjoins incongruous justapositions of mundane subjects with fantastic imagery to create a "super-reality" superior to the world of the senses. Interpretation can differ. Erpino belies the idea of symbolism in her work, "though people look for it there," she says.
As with all surrealists, her art carries recurring motifs, among them checkerboards, Corinthian columns, cracking earth, holes in the ground, skeletons, Celtic occult rocks, druidic trees, mummies, gazebos, rhinos, ruins, frogs and floating "Oz" bubbles.
A major theme is "nature will take over in the end. It's stronger than our destruction of it" . . . This reclamation is a response to human violence, in the Surrealist tradition of transforming social, scientific and philosophical values.
Erpino sees her art as a means of such communication, and as a coping method. The realism that fosters such a "representational" approach came with the flowering of her drawing during the mid-'90s (utilizing Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), though she's painted for 22 years.
Her hallucinatory visions include a totem tornado of swirling, screaming, sexual nudes in a shimmering placenta waterspout. Like an acid trip, objects are in flux, vibrating with constant momentum. Some electron-charged callalillies evoke O'Keefe and Birchfield. I saw spectral faces in waterfalls and candle smoke. Images of Colobus monkeys chewing through bark to the bricks underneath, frog-filled merry-go-round gazebos, nomads mounting rhino-camels, and an enthroned female skeleton (with breasts) bludgeoned by a one-socked skeletal male seem Freudian, like images of Dali.
Erpino sites Dali as an influence, but also Kahlo, Breughel, Escher and Dr. Seuss. She had to be told of her art's "darkness"; commissions required a lighter, happier palette. Her teacher, Sal Casa, stressed contrasting values, to "read" in black and white.
Often working 10-hour days, Erpino claims to be "nearly antisocial except when traveling, which is not compatible with painting." Still, she's left a wood carving in a Sydney bookstore, a sign in an Amsterdam hotel, one mural in Jackson Hole, Wyo., another in Mexicali, Mexico. She worked on The Pathfinder Mural in New York. She's known Los Angeles and Peru. Locally she's taught art at the Chico Art Center for five years, organized childrens' workshops, lectured at schools and curated an exhibit for the Wall Street Center for the Arts (now defunct). She's done theatrical backdrops, a mural for the Chico Museum and the cover of a poetry journal. Her website (www.annerpino.com) features galleries, free critiques and tips, a visual-art terminology glossary and class offerings.Her work may be seen in Chico at the Sin of Cortez Café and at Wispered Prayers Mystical Grove.
A perusal of Erpino's work locally will inspire a trek to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art to view, through Sept. 5, the paintings of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). A comprehensive retrospective of the artist has not transpired in 50 years!
The 63 paintings, in six theme rooms, run the gamut of the offhanded minimalist (a sentence on a black background) to the ultra-realist dreamscapes that put Magirtte before Dali in the encyclopedia's reference to Surrealism. Surrealism is in again, for the first time since the '60s, when Magritte was still painting. His 1965 work of a long-haired being crowned with a bowler anticipated Cousin It from the Addams Family TV show. I remember seeing (on four-way windowpane) "The Liberator," a faceless cloaked man against a sky of cubed clouds, in '69, in Los Angeles, thinking the museum gaurds were alerting each other to my state via walkie-talkie.
Some of the images that inspired "Magritte, " my tribute song to the master, were on hand; the twilight flying French bread, the concrete still life, the canvas that overlaps the landscape it depicts, the giant soap and comb, the apple that fills a room (famed as the cover of Beckola), the coffins designed to accomodate a sitting corpse, the chateaus inset in tree stumps, the segmented nudes (body parts individually framed), the jigsaw-piece canvasses in gnarled frames - it was all there.
I was particularly taken with "The Face of Genius," a plaster mask unraveling above an embossed bush, and some flying futuristic projectiles on a sunburst green horizon. The varnishes and delicate gradations of shading and color had at times a Rebmrandt patina, not evident from reproductions.
When commissioned to do a self-portrait, Magritte hid his face behind an apple. A bland suit and bowler (his real-life attire) further emphasized the internal self over the external. Mundane objects - a match or a shaving brush - are given enlarged stature and importance, as in Zen, where important matters are taken lightly.
Magritte's mother committed suicide, by drowning, when he was a boy. He saw the nude body (with a negligee up over the face) fished from the river. His people often are draped about the face, the women naked and victims of foul play. Beyond the claustrophobic rooms - where men peer through keyholes, even at their own wives - closets, petrified castles and hedgerow mazes await ethereal valleys, meadows, oceans and mountains framed by red velvet curtains, and capped with iridescent stars and sculpted clouds. For me, his work's as close a rendition of heaven itself, outside of dreams.
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