Style

Three Maine Sculptors

BY FREDERICK LYNCH

UT IS it Art? is a phrase that often echos through galleries, dimming the limelight of beautiful things. Perhaps a more timely debate could focus from the question of when and how craft objects transcend 'mere craft' and assume fine

A.bby H,mtoon

art status. No problem. What is art? Contradiction. What is craft? Assurance. When does craft become art? When certainty is questioned, when skill admits it's not infallible.

Consider the well-spoken-for art/ objects of three locally shown people. Each uses clay, a material of amiable plasticity and patient endurance. It's architectural, sculptural, and as a recent show at Boston's Museum of Fine Art revealed, acquiescent to a variety of painterly contrivances. Although these three treat clay in differing ways, each retains, to varying degrees, that 'clay-like' quality so universally sought and admired by other potters. All three make vessels, useful vessels, able to hold their own, so to speak. Polly Cook, Paul Heroux, and Abby Huntoon all make well-crafted, welldesigned, functionally viable clay products, most assuredly. However, it is that 'leap of the imagination' that carries their work over into the fine art of contradiction. Each artist reaches beyond the fll.!1(:tionand form context, altering and manipulating the shapes, colors, textures, even the clay itself to probe the elusive, the dramatic, and the poignant.

At first glance, Polly Cook's pieces appear to be less than well crafted. A second thought, that her methods of production are simply affectation, is as disconcerting. But as the eye settles from the 'raison d'etre,' the images and stories, the illusions (and disillusions) that fully cover each piece, the fabrication details become either incidental or a kind of necessary evil.

For it appears that Polly Cook is thinking painting, not pottery, modern short story rather than contemporary hand-made. An urgent sense of love is gleaned more from pop views than from the classics. Uniquely recalling the German Expressionists of the 1900s (but with later comic-book clarity and flair for drama), her themes echo a century of publicly displayed affairs of the soul. Like her puzzling methods of construction, Polly's craftsmanship suggests a style found somewhere between the sophistication of Max Beckman and the naivete of early Clark Kent. It's this, , ambivalent ground, between 'good' and 'bad' drawing, of unassuming and eccentric characters, of soap and grand opera acted out simultaneously, that Polly Cook's contradictory artistic nature prevails. Simulating the Expressionists' stark and direct woodcut medium, the pathos and theater of her tableaus seem all the more immediate and accessible.

When does craft become art? When certainty is questioned, when skill admits it's not infallible.

Solid craftsmanship is always a given with Paul Heroux's work. Here the question of fine craft versus fine art, tedious to most clay work done today, is both justified and relevant. For example, Paul's vases, stripped of SQlor and image, can eloquently express the power of pure form and function that all good potters strive for. Often evoking the:.subtle refinements of shape and contour found in classical Greek ware, they carry with them a patrician air of resolve and completeness. But then there's the surface, the 'shaped canvas,' so to speak, on which Heroux paints with the immediacy of a 1950s action painter and introspection of a Rene Magritte. And surreal they may well be. Surreal in the mix of lines, colors, and patterns that flatter themselves, while on another side (the dark side?), images of personality and humanity emerge and retreat. Here is that elusive plane, once again, of contradiction and assurance, of reasonable pictures distorted by the swell of a shoulder or curve of a foot (vases are almost human) into a dreamlike realism, a kind of rational disorder. As the inquisitive eye absorbs, the critical eye relaxes; narrative and decorative lines blur,