Robert Erickson; Seana Thir

by Lesley Wright, Director, Faulconer Gallery,
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa
October 2006

“with reverent feet, stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully”
–Robert Lloyd Praeger
                                                                                            
In the spring of 2005, Robert Erickson spent two months at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation’s Artist in Rural Ireland Program. Based in Ballycastle on the Atlantic Ocean, in northwest County Mayo, the program offered Erickson the chance to immerse himself in a harsh and beautiful environment of peat, rock, fog, wind, and water. Erickson has an intuitive affinity for far northern places and felt intensely at home in Ballycastle. Out of his residency has come his most recent body of work, Seana Thir, Irish for “old land.” These pieces represent an intensification or clarification of concepts and images he has long explored. Above all, his time in Ireland pushed him to ask, again, the questions of self, of art, and of place that lie at the heart of his creative process.
           

As he talks about Seana Thir, Erickson acknowledges his persistent fascination with the north. Raised in Wisconsin, the artist has a fondness for the fields and forests of Stevens Point where he now resides, for the sterner landscape of northern Wisconsin where his family vacationed, and for the austere drama of the state’s cold, snowy winters. The rugged Irish coast has all these elements in a more extreme and primal form. As he wandered the bogs and cliffs, he embraced the ancient history of the place, steeped in pagan and Christian religions and battered by weather for eons. County Mayo became a catalyst for pushing his art, and stripping away some of the complexity of the layered, contemporary, American Midwest.
       
Erickson captures his Irish experience in prints and paintings of isolated, evocative, familiar yet unidentifiable objects: humps, mounds, piles, stacks, tangles, and skeins. As subjects, seen without the benefit of a relative point of comparison, they are almost impossible to identify as monumental or tiny. The original source could be a seed pod or a cloud, a stack of peat or an ocean cliff. The confusion of scale happens no matter what the size of the art work:  his panels and prints range in dimension from six by six inches up to 40 x 30 inches. In their earth tones and mottled backgrounds, his works are infused with the passage of time, erosion, decay, and with processes that gather, organize and collect small pieces into larger accretions. Erickson revels in the multiplicity of association that his images evoke, hoping we will bring to them our own memories of ant hills, dangling moss, hay stacks, birds’ nests, fungi, or weird rocks distilled from wherever we find our spiritual connections in the natural world.
Whether Erickson starts from a quartzite sea cliff or a desiccated flower, the image he creates anchors to the top or bottom of his canvas or paper. Each work of art has a single focus, and occupies the artist in the same way a rare specimen fascinates a scientist or a beautiful object delights a collector. We read the surface of the print or painting as a field of experience or a window that connects, in Western culture, to a landscape. Were the image wholly untethered, it could float free like a microbe or celestial body, but Erickson wants to preserve the connection to the earth, to the ground we walk upon, to the time scale we understand. These may be ancient things, odd and unidentified, but they coexist with human time and space.

As Erickson talks about the work, he refers to the physicality of making art. His relationship to the paper or panel on which he creates, the feel of the paint and ink, the gesture of hand or arm or torso needed to make the mark are all essential components of the final image. Here, too, the Irish experience as catalyst comes into the creation of these works of art that drip with the waters of fog and rain, swirl out of the dense mists, harden in the biting cold, or pile up like a stone wall. The tactile grit and grace of the world that compels Erickson is more the subject of his art than any exact artifact of man or nature.

Erickson creates his images using any technique that can help him achieve the sense of a thing becoming or eroding before our eyes. He may employ drawing, or monoprint, or painting. He combines techniques frequently: drawing on Mylar before creating a plate for printing, soaking and stretching a print in order to paint on it, or sketching an idea in wire and tar before capturing it in two dimensions.

As Erickson makes an image, he creates an experience of a thing unique to that work of art. His marks engage the control of decades of training but also employ chance events of ink or paint. He intends his creative process to emulate the processes happening on the shore, along the road, or in the woods. Each piece is an experiment or an investigation and when it succeeds, the art is the record of the questions asked that day. He challenges himself by trying new techniques, working bigger or smaller than he is comfortable, modeling the form in new ways, and seeking alternatives to his usual way of seeing the object in space. He knows that through these challenges come happy accidents and calculated transformations.

Some of Erickson’s works evoke columns of smoke, bubbles, or cairns of piled stone. They are more rounded and complex than the streaming mesas, thin bundles of grass, or humps of seaweed that may be pictured in other works. In nature, smoke, stones, bubbles all bind together with complex physics. There is an order to the way the physical objects hang together. And as their order becomes apparent in Erickson’s image, we can hover in the moment before the smoke will vanish, the bubble will burst or the stones will tumble. In each finished work of art, Erickson gives us something that can never be finished or could be there forever, that is always becoming something else or will never change.  He gives us the concrete and the ephemeral, the thing itself and its emotional resonance.  Seana Thir is now a part of Erickson, and a place he will return to again and again with his body as he makes art, and with his spirit as he tries to snag his memories of all that is ancient, fading, reappearing and stubbornly persisting through the ages.