It was in 1967, when Barbara Rossi was a student-at-large dutifully following the dictates of academic figure painting, that those strange and wonderful drawings erupted.
They came out of nowhere and were like nothing she had seen before:
cartoonish jumbles of what resembled squashed body parts and organs. These wads and mounds of organic forms began with a central shape and grew from there-finally, as the rectangle of paper filled up, adopting the contours of a misshapen head and shoulders.
Things would never be the same for Rossi, in part because others had, in fact, seen something like these drawings before.
”I was taking this Saturday class at the School of the Art Institute, and these stream-of-consciousness drawings seemed to start of their own accord,” Rossi said of that critical epiphany.
”They weren`t the result of a teacher`s suggestion, and I had nothing in my way of making art or in my visual experience that gave me any images that looked anything like that. Both other students and my teacher said, `Do you know about the Hairy Who?` ”
Not until some months later, when one of her drawings was accepted for the 1968 Chicago and Vicinity exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, did she discover for herself what her classmates and teacher were talking about.
”Of course, I was elated just to be in it. Then, when I went to see the show, my piece was hung between works by Ray Yoshida and Suellen Rocca, and Gladys Nillson`s piece, which I think won a prize that year, was on the other side of Ray`s.”
Rossi found her drawing sandwiched between works by the rising stars of Chicago Imagism, Hairy Who chapter. These were artists who were mining a distinctly Midwestern vein-a peculiar alloy of Surrealism, popular culture, folk and high art that, it just so happened, looked an awful lot like the drawings that had been pouring out of her for the past year.
”I looked at all this work,” said Rossi, ”and I said, `Hmmm. Now this is interesting. It would certainly be nice to meet these people some day.` ” Rossi entered the Master of Fine Arts program at the school later that year. She did indeed meet those people and soon was appearing alongside many of them in exhibitions that further expanded the definition of Imagism. Her own trajectory is now charted at the Renaissance Society in ”Barbara Rossi:
Selected Works 1967-1990.”
The exhibition begins with several of those first drawings and includes her most recent paintings, singular interpretations of classical Indian iconography which seem worlds apart even as they continue some of her earliest technical concerns. It reveals, through drawings, paintings on Plexiglas, Masonite and canvas and one of her quilts from the early `70s, a kind of pilgrim`s progress enacted within the parameters of contemporary painting, a questing after formal and metaphysical perfection-or grace, if you will.
Various polarities vibrate within Rossi`s work like the yin and yang of Oriental philosophy: male and female, figuration versus abstraction, spontaneity versus control. This last polarity arises explicitly in two seemingly opposed modes of artmaking that are represented in her oeuvre by the drawings, especially early on, and by the paintings.
Speaking of those first drawings, Rossi said she ”was thinking about a head, but initially, it was a surprise to me that that`s what I had made. Afterwards, it was like guiding this stream of consciousness to develop into a head and shoulders.
”Almost like meditation in a way, you try to incorporate everything that passes through your mind and keep concentrated until you come to the end. And if your concentration is very good, the idea is realized.”
By contrast, painting on Plexiglas requires arduous preparation, in part because the paint is applied to the underside and is seen through the Plexiglas. Consequently the painting is executed as a reverse image, and what would otherwise be the final surface touches must be applied first.
For the paintings on canvas and Masonite, ”there`s a whole batch of drawings that have been worked out for each one,” said Rossi.
”I make cartoons for those, careful line drawings on separate sheets of paper. Then I transfer them to the Masonite or canvas and also do sets of small-scale color studies until I get exactly the color I want.”
That color, like much else about her paintings, is exquisitely balanced, often incorporating a range of similar hues that resonate like a musical chord. The bulk of her output has utilized pastel-like tones, though some of the early Plexiglas paintings show somewhat more intensity, and Rossi consciously set about deepening her tones through the 1970s, through both her study of Matisse and of Indian painting.
During that decade, Rossi`s formal vocabulary was delineated: Within a flattened space, a kind of geometric landscape is suggested; a figure derived from coiling, looping lines inhabits or traverses that space, shadowed by a larger set of knotted forms. The surfaces of many of the paintings from the
`70s are activated by small lines composed of thousands of meticulous dots, some like strands of DNA, others outlining forms.
Rossi also turned to Sienese narrative paintings as material for the paintings from 1977 on. But in her hands, in paintings such as ”Raw Siena”
and ”Waveland,” forms are pared down and the narrative becomes purified and elusive, even as it is redolent of struggle and spiritual journeys.
Her references to earlier art historical imagery become overt in a series of paintings from the early 1980s, which include characteristically distilled interpretations of crucifixion scenes in ”Crucifixion by a Thread” and ”El Sombrero,” and of Indian nayika paintings in ”Sleepers” and ”Two Lights.” The Indian element has predominated in the obsessive, colored pencil drawings from the mid-`80s and in her most recent paintings. Interestingly, these works also developed instinctually and were once again echoed in an extant body of work previously unknown to her.
In 1976, before any specifically Indian iconic imagery surfaced in her work, Rossi visited India and had the opportunity to show her slides to a number of interested parties, among them a prominent Indian art historian.
As Rossi explained, ”I hadn`t told him anything about the work-I just handed the slide sheets to him. He looked at them, and immediately said he could put an Indian painting from the Malwa tradition (a regional variant of the classical Rajput style) next to every single one of my paintings and show a similar formal process.”
”Malwa is a very economical tradition of painting, quite flat, very essentialized. It`s also one of the traditions of miniature painting where there`s a great, joyful sense of humor-the monsters in these paintings menace their victims with great glee.”
In her paintings from 1989 and 1990 such as ”Coup” and ”K. & R. D. & D.,” Rossi utilizes the figures of the god Krishna and his devotee Radha, whose joyful rendezvous and dance were a familiar theme of Rajput and Malwa painting. The lightness, symmetry and elegance of these works seem to represent a resolution, however temporary, of those polarities that have coursed through Rossi`s work.
Here is the union of the spiritual and material worlds, of the personal and universal, in a dance that can be seen to enact, as Carol Becker puts it in her catalog essay, ”the physics of transcendence.”
”I`ve certainly used Christian iconography, and that`s to be expected,” said Rossi. ”You have to work through whatever visual materials were around you as you grew up.
”I`m not finished, of course. For instance, I`ve been attracted to Indian material for years, even before I went there. But I`m not so sure that any of that is a matter of will. I`m simply figuring out for myself what these great images mean and making my own version of them.”
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”Barbara Rossi: Selected Works 1967-1990” can be seen through Feb. 24 at the Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. on the University of Chicago campus.
