Seduction by Centipede: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri

Seduction by Centipede: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri

Above: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Unexpected Odyssey, oil on clayboard, 46” × 60”. Opposite: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, The Cactus Vendor, oil on wood, 41.5” × 14.5”.

Asmall greenhouse on Santa Fe’s East Side is the dominion of Texas orbweavers, wolf spiders, and black widows. It’s also the domain of painter Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, who frequently observes the spiders’ languid promenades and highflying web-spinning acrobatics, and sometimes draws or paints at a table there. “All species are endlessly fascinating to me,” she says. “My childhood experiences with wild creatures along the Rio Grande lit the way for the rest of my life.”

On one greenhouse shelf, diminutive agave palmeri, soaptree yucca, Gambel oak, and datura sprout from seeds the artist collected in the wild. “We built the greenhouse as a reaction to the pandemic so we could grow our own food. It has blossomed into a pleasure garden of succulents, flowers, herbs, and cacti.” That

Olivieri thrives in natural surrounds is attested by the plants packed into every available sun-soaked nook of her greenhouse and home. She’s a frequent hiker, and collects footage from wildlife cameras she’s placed to observe forest residents. With echoes of Mexican magical realism, Olivieri’s works blur the delineations between wilderness and civilization, between human and animal.

Her pieces often have an unruliness to them. They’re painted on reclaimed wood, often doors, and incorporate found objects, such as rusty tin cans, that she collects on hikes. “My favorite part of creating is feeling the spark of an idea, or an intense joyful or strange thought, and figuring out a way to make it visual—to draw it, to make it come alive in a painting,” she says.

“I never censor myself or worry about getting it just right. For me, the desire to do it, and even revealing the difficulty in doing it, is appealing to me. A painting

I’m finishing up now was inspired by something that happened in the middle of the night. I was half awake and sleepily petting my cat, Luchini, who was sleeping beside me, when suddenly I felt that I was petting every bear, fox, and bobcat who lives up in the forest.

My cat became a portal to letting me pet all the wild animals I’ll never get to pet in real life.”

These pieces often come together in Olivieri’s studio, which is up a winding outdoor stairway from the greenhouse, the steps lined with the skeletal, sentinel-like stalks of spent agave blooms. Inside, sketches and completed works are hung salon style. In Disappearing by Nature, a female figure is transported and floats above a field of desert flora, naked but for socks and Mary Jane shoes that seem the last things buckling her to society. Even so, the figure has already kicked off one shoe. “The painting came about as a reaction to seeing people I love leave this earth in sad, unbearable ways, and how much I hope to leave the earth by means of an encounter with nature, rather than in a hospital,” Olivieri says. The painting is filled with tiny inscriptions of the most poisonous traits of many species. The woman’s shoes are also an ode to Olivieri’s second-grade self—in her studio she keeps a portrait of herself in her schoolgirl days. “I don’t want to let her down.”

Olivieri’s upbringing in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas greatly influenced her relationship with the natural world. Her father, a farmer, cultivated in his children a connection to the land and creativity. One Christmas, he gave them a truckload of what they called “carrot dirt,” soil from the carrot harvest on the farm. “After the initial shock me, my brother, and my sister had—What? Dirt for Christmas?—the little mountain of rich, dark carrot dirt came alive over the next few weeks,” Olivieri says. “We made tunnels and little rivers all over it, planted rows of orange and lemon seeds, made miniature orchards, built tiny houses, people, and animals. My childhood had a beautiful kind of natural resourcefulness.

“In my painting Seduction by Centipede,” Olivieri continues, “a tiny ladder leads up to a scarlet bed with saguaro cacti as bedposts. Before the man has gone up the ladder, he’s left his hat, clothing, and boots down below, on a yucca plant. There are miniature men waiting in line to ascend the ladder behind him, not knowing what special

desert love potions await. Will he be brave enough for the giant centipede to be released on his body by the lovely desert girl? Will he be ready for the Gila monster to walk across his broad shoulders? The hanging cages of scorpions, snakes, and spiders are suspended like the wild mysteries and uncertainties of love. As in many of my paintings, there is tiny text I’ve painted from research and field studies of various subjects. I paint in my own words; my eagerness to learn and understand the subject or creature excites me to inscribe the words onto my painting as if to inscribe it into my mind, my heart.” Intended to inform, this writing also functions as temptation to keep the viewer looking, to allow each painting to keep revealing itself.

Opposite: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Disappearing by Nature, oil on wood, 30” × 43”. Above: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Seduction by Centipede, oil on clayboard, 30” X 30”.

Above: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, I drop everything when I see you., oil on wood, 55” × 79”.

These ruminations emerge from Olivieri’s voracious research. The haphazard stacks of books gathered at the corners of her desk have such titles as Cacti & Succulents, Common Southwestern Native Plants, and The Sex Life of the Animals.

Her travels have taken her to the Amazon River and to central Mexico. She’s hopscotched the country, having lived in New York, Oregon, Arizona, and Maine. She’s gained a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of each of those locales, from harbor seals in Maine to packrats in Arizona. Her Your touch, a thousand wild creatures., for example, celebrates the desert with an Edenic lushness that packs in renderings of New Mexican creatures ranging from the roadrunner to the coatimundi.

Olivieri collects as much as she researches. A glass display case lining her studio’s hallway looks as if it were lifted from a natural-history museum. Its shelves are lined with snake bones, crab claws, coral, the eggshell-like forms of anemones, porcupine quills, and the skulls of raven, fox, and bobcat. Each can serve as inspiration, art material, or both.

Olivieri has often created entire works out of rodent bones recovered from owl pellets—regurgitated masses of hair and bone that owls are unable to digest. From a distance, the final pieces look like primitive lacework. “It connects me in a way to these creatures,” she says, “and they get to live on. They may seem little and insignificant, but every creature deserves to be celebrated in a beautiful way.”

In addition to her show at EVOKE Contemporary, Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’s artwork will appear in a forthcoming Netflix series produced and written by Guillermo del Toro, Cabinet of Curiosities, in an episode titled “Dreams in the Witch House.”

—Ashley M. Biggers

Top: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Encantada, bones, porcupine quills on copper tray, 29.5” diameter. Bottom: Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, Your touch, a thousand wild creatures., oil on clayboard, 48” × 72”.