Photograph courtesy of Sheldon Concert Hall
It’s the August Inventory shows again. You might prefer to be poolside with a cool mojito right now, but there is art to see in pleasant air-conditioned galleries. Unfortunately, this is also the fallow period before the real art season opens up again (some time in mid-September!) and is littered with the unwanted remainder from past exhibitions-like dried straw in a field after the harvest. I could write about how cleverly galleries have repackaged their “unwanted” into thematic shows by rearranging their flat files and reshuffling their racks. However, there are some pleasant surprises elsewhere. Erik Spehn’s drawings at the Sheldon Galleries are fittingly made, for an August show at least, from the unwanted physical remainder of his painting technique. Weaved together from the mounds of discarded masking tape he uses to block of areas of canvas, the drawings are recognizable as Spehn’s handiwork, but they also feel less obsessive than his better-known paintings. They alternately look like aerial views of neatly manicured wheat fields or intricately woven cloth. Most of the drawings explore yellow tints and shades, a few mix it up with blue tones and the overall effect is one of quiet restraint. There is always a dazzling visual record of intensive labor involved—peeling, reapplying, masking, cutting, painting, peeling away again. An anecdote about John Singer Sargent goes thus: He would paint a portrait all day. At the end of the day, he’d scrape away all the paint and resume the painting the next day. This Sisyphus routine was repeated for months until a translucency of skin tone was achieved through the accumulation of ghostly layers for the masterpiece “Madame X.” One gets a sense that Spehn shares this concentration and stamina—enabling him to paint with workman-like steadiness even through the dog days of summer.
Erik Spehn: Tape Drawings runs through September 18, 2010 in the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery at the Sheldon Art Galleries, 3648 Washington, 314-533-9900, thesheldon.org.
Daniel McGrath is an adjunct art history professor at Webster University and curator of Isolation Room/Gallery Kit, a very, very small unregistered non-profit exhibition space in St Louis.
