The narrative-painting exhibit Understanding Ourselves cleared out of the Chehalem Cultural Center over the weekend, but it was there when I visited a few weeks ago to see another exhibit, Kairos: Eco Print Series by Lisa Brinkman, around the corner in the Central Gallery.
Any one of the paintings from either exhibit would have seemed wildly out of place had it been moved into the other, yet having them under the same roof illustrated the range of tools an artist has to tell a story, even when it’s not immediately obvious that a story is being told.
Brinkman’s contact prints are deliberately yet instinctively crafted using the stuff of nature — plants, leaves, flowers — “cooked” into raw silk, then adorned with layers of acrylic, oil paints, and cold-wax translucent glazes. They tell — perhaps “suggest” or “hint at” is the way to characterize it — stories through the use of symbols, which are drawn from nature: a dove, a crow, a serpent, or a butterfly; the sun or moon. But mythological figures also are present — Pegasus and Sophia, the spirit of female wisdom.
Because many familiar symbols date back millennia, it is unfathomably rich territory. As the feminist literary historian Barbara Walker remarks in The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, symbols that we’ve come to associate with orthodox religion may have “evolved from very different contexts in the prepatriarchal past.”
Indeed, the title of the show, which runs through April 30, also dates back millennia. Brinkman explains in the show’s notes that what the Greeks called “Kairos” is a moment “opportune and ripe for change.” We are living in such a time, she writes, where “we are experiencing a collective rite of passage descending daily into unfolding global crises of mythic proportions. The Coronavirus pandemic, outrage towards … racial inequities, social and environmental injustices, climate catastrophe — all while the pulse of life hangs in the balance. My latest eco-printed paintings are a collaboration of life with Nature. With them, I wish to inspire, a remembering of our relationship with Gaia — humanity, the plant and animal world, all nested together, within the Cosmos.”
Rather than try to explain the “how” of that collaboration with nature, you can see it for yourself in a helpful video Brinkman makes available on her website. It’s a labor-intensive process infused with an element of chaos, “a state where you really don’t know what is going to occur,” she said. “It loosens some of my control, so I have to respond to the process.” The resulting images are an earthy mix of abstraction, symbolism, and collage that resonate on multiple levels.
