Robert Erickson; New Hope

by Suzanne A. Woods, Director of the Model and Niland Centre,
Sligo, Ireland

The relationship pf art to life experience is a dominant theme in twentieth century art. Pursuing many lines of inquiry, artists reflect upon, illustrate and/or critique life around them whether urban or rural, cultured or natural. On a personal level, they investigate their environment and their response to the shape and pattern of it order to find their place3. On a larger level, they give voice, by their experience and response, to some of the concerns of the time in which we live, providing insights for others.

Robert Erickson is such an artist, creating drawings, prints, and paintings that objectify explorations of the environment.“Relationship” is a key word for Erickson; relationship of past to present, of himself to others, of himself to his local environment, of one shape to another, of his drawings to his paintings, of his paintings to his prints, of each work to the other. The list could extend indefinitely, and paramount is the affinity that exists between his visual work and his everyday activities. He describes, for example, how working in the garden can sometimes lead him to find the solution that helps finish a painting on which he has been working.

Erickson creates images that have shapes from the natural world as their source. He is inspired by such simple and elegant forms as seedpods, insect cocoons, a twig on the branch of a tree. He is not an illustrator, however. Erickson’s response is more poetic than scientific. He distills impressions of his environment, creating images that are a synthesis of the things he sees. An image may resemble the fissure in the bark of a tree or a willowy blade of grass. A form may suggest the flight pattern of a flock of birds or make you think of dandelion down and, sometimes, a life form at the cellular level. Creating confusion is not Erickson’s point. Rather, he draws connections between shapes, alludes to their relationships between them.

Erickson’s affinity for the natural world can be traced childhood vacations. Although he grew up in a suburban environment, every summer until he went away to college, Erickson vacationed with his family at a lakeside cabin northern Wisconsin. Spending three months a year outdoors swimming or walking, finding treasures in lakeside pools or on the forest floor, constructing forts made of branches and grasses with his cousins, all provided an image of an idyllic childhood. It wasn’t nostalgia for his childhood that drew him to his current home in central Wisconsin; rather he recognized that the rural environment suits him and provides the kind of stimulus he needs for his creative work.

It has been since he and his wife, Susan, moved to their farmhouse on thirty acres of woods and pasture that Erickson’s visual work has gained a strength and coherence that reflects a “connection found” between his work and his place. The environment in which he lives provides not only inspiration and source material for the development of ideas but the kind of lifestyle he finds stimulating.

Erickson’s studio is in a remodeled hayloft of an old barn that sits on his property. Windows look out on his house and the surrounding fields. Even the pine-paneled studio interior provides an appropriate aesthetic environment for his work place. The vertical lines of the panels and the knots and fissures in the wood complement the forms he draws and paints. Works-in-progress lie on the tables and re stacked against the walls. Amongst the paintings and drawings are stalks of dried sunflowers, weathered branches and intriguingly shaped gourds.

For the past year, Erickson has focused on making small works; most fall in the range of approximately 3” x 5” to 24” x 30”. Originally, he conceived of his small drawings and paintings s studies for larger works, but he soon realized the small scale suited his subject matter and process of investigation. Erickson regards his studio practice as one of inquiry and, naturally, finds the small scale allows him to get through more ideas. He spends several hours a day in his studio, some days generating a number of drawings, other days concentrating on a single work. Whether painting or drawing, his studio process is a familiar one of making and erasing marks until he is satisfied with the work. This may take ten minutes, several days or longer.

One line of Erickson’s inquiry is a t the level of building skill in the various media with which he works. He often mixes media, drawing with charcoal on top of an acrylic wash, fixing the drawing, and working on top of that with ink. In preparing the wood panels on which he paints, he sometimes adheres tar paper and then removes sections of it, leaving an uneven, tactile surface. He applies gesso over this and then begins painting, finding the texture complementary to the subject matter.

Erickson’s primary investigations, however, are with the shapes and forms of nature. There, he finds inspiration both in the combination of elegant and supremely functional

structures that such forms embody and in the commonalities between unlike objects. There is a superficial affinity between Erickson’s investigations and the influential theories that describe the underlying structure of the world.

For instance, Pythagoras and, in a much later extension, D’Arcy Thompson conceived a harmonious relationship between all parts of the universe, an order made known through mathematical formulae. Similarly, Johannes Kepler imposed a n intricate order on the cosmos following Platonic and Pythagorean concepts. To say, however, that Erickson is seeking to impose a structure on the forms he investigates would be a misrepresentation. Rather than impose a formula, he reveals a pattern and does so in a playful and poetic fashion.

Erickson describes that as children he and his cousin built model cars and trucks. Often they didn’t use all the extra parts and, therefore, had a stockpile of extra model parts. It was most fun to assemble hybrid vehicles from the left-over parts. Erickson’s visual work is like that, hybrid in form and content. Is a painting that of an insect cocoon attached to a twig or of a tent made with hide and bent branches? These forms often suggest more subtle and elemental associations, shelter and protection, for example, or they swell with life or elude to metamorphosis. Within each work Erickson may have brought together information from multiple sources, and often this process is more intuitive than conscious. HE may be working form his memory of an object he has seen while walking in the woods, or he may be referencing to a form that he has painted on numerous occasions, each time slightly altering and refining it. Viewers of his work sometimes find relationships Erickson hadn’t thought of, and he considers a work complete and successful when viewers are caught between identifying an image and then realizing it is not that at all. It may be this, that, or another thing.

It has long been Erickson’s practice to lay his drawings and prints on a table where he can see then all, moving them around to find shapes that suit one another or to find combinations that suggest a new image to create. In this process, he selects works he considers strong enough to keep and rejects others. An interesting collaboration, which reinforced this collage method, occurred while he in residence with Armstrong-Prior Inc., in Phoenix, Arizona. John Armstrong and Joan Prior, who operate a fine art print shop, had seen Erickson’s work at the Flight Zone Gallery in Phoenix and suggested he work with them on a project. In 1998, Erickson spent a week at their shop where he worked with printers john Armstrong and Mary Statzer. Erickson created numerous small intaglio plates using a dental drill and bits to ender his drawings. After they were printed, he began laying them side by side to form pairs and small groups of compatible works. Then he and Armstrong decoded to make a suite of prints using pairs of plates for each print. The result is New Hope Connections, a suite of eight intaglio prints.

With his paintings, Erickson  follows a similar editing process as with his drawings, stacking them on a board leaning against a wall. He moves the paintings to rest beside or on top of one another, finding relationships and satisfactory combinations. There may be twenty to thirty small paintings in such an arrangement, and he will often include a small drawing and/or print in the group. There is an immediate impact to seeing the paintings in such an arrangement that is greater than the sum of its parts. This display mechanism complements entirely the content of Erickson’s work and his working process, suggesting further relationships between forms and between works of different scale and in diverse media.

Within the past year, this informal studio arrangement of paintings has had a major effect on the manner in which he exhibits the work. In September 1998, at the Carlsten Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, he virtually duplicated his studio arrangements by setting up three such installations. He used low shelves on which support boards could rest and then stacked from the floor to a height of approximately eight feet. Each installation could be viewed as a large-scale painting or, more intimately, a s numerous small works. There was a dynamic impact to each installation given their irregular borders, varying the scale of the paintings within, and the vertical thrust of the arrangement. It is interesting to note that when Erickson was recently cleaning his barn, he came across a stack of wood planks that had been covered for over several years. In the stack of wood, you’ll  find the seed of the idea he would later employ in the Carlsten Gallery.

While forms and shapes from nature inform the subject matter of Erickson’s work, his studio investigations are grounded in formalist issues. He is concerned about the quality of line, the harmony of shape and background, the illusion and manipulation of the three-dimensional effects, the nuances of color. Like Modernist painters such as Barnett Newman or Adolph Gottlieb who each evolved a visual language combining simple shapes and a limited color palette, Erickson is concerned with paring things down to essential elements, conveying his ideas with no more detail than is necessary. Erickson admires the work of Arthur Dove. In his abstracted landscapes, Dove developed simple means to convey his multi-layered responses to the natural world. In a similar manner, Erickson is developing a vocabulary of forms that are suggestive of natural sources and, at the same time, creating images that can be read by their formalist vocabulary as elegant objects. Erickson’s imagery of organic shapes is centered on a monochrome ground. Individually, each image does not appear to tell a story beyond the picture frame. A combination of images, in which the individual pieces relate to each other and to the entire arrangement, may suggest a multitude of narratives.

People have commented upon the relationship of Erickson’s work and some of the Oriental arts. Although he has not extensively studied Asian art nor does he consciously refer to it, there are both obvious and subtle similarities. His work is an indication of the extent to which Asian influence has penetrated Western art in the twentieth century. In China, for example, where there has been an emphasis on landscape painting for over one thousand years, painters experience the landscape by walking through it, absorbing its essential character before returning to their studio to paint their interpretations. Painters such as seventeenth-century Dao Ji distorted landforms to reveal their inner structure and the life force or energy believed to animate all things. Similarly, Erickson spends time walking and looking, compiling mental impressions that he will later distill on paper.

In both Chinese paintings and Japanese prints, you find that natural forms are abstracted and simplified and the linear aspect dominates. In discussions of his work, Erickson emphasizes his concern with line, that it be precise, that it be descriptive, that it exhibits areas of delicacy and other of power. In Oriental calligraphy, there is an emphasis on preparation, the development of skill and the proper mental and physical attitude so that the line, when drawn or painted, will appear to be a spontaneous expression of beauty and meaning. While Erickson does not employ the ritual procedures of Oriental calligraphers, he does intend for his images to convey a similar attitude of completeness and elegance.

Erickson’s choice of color also lends to their affinity with Asian works. His palette is earthy like his subject matter and is a choice undoubtedly influenced by his work in prints. He employs umbers, ochres, and richly nuanced blacks. The shapes he draws in ink, charcoal, or paint rest on backgrounds that are thin veils of a similar color. Recently, he has been staining the paper on which he draws using a solution made from boiling oak gall and tea. The solution tones the paper and leaves a residue of flecks making the paper resemble a sheet of Japanese paper such a s Kitakata or Hoshu.

Erickson’s interest in nature as subject matter can, of course, be discussed in relation to environmental art from the 1970’s onward. As one of the major developments in the pluralistic ‘70’s that sought to reconnect art to life experience, environmental art brought an interest in landscape to the land itself. Artists work in the environment, manipulating and reconfiguring the land, or they use the land as a stage for objects they have made. Typically, the objects environmental artists install in the land are simple forms resembling natural shapes like spirals and circles, or they may be inspired by ancient monuments which themselves reflect sources in nature. For example, in Christo’s monumental collaborative works, he draws attention to the shape and beauty of landforms or urban sites by wrapping them or installing fabric, as he did in Running Fence. That fence cross twenty-two miles of land in California reads as a line, swelling over hillsides, narrowing in shallow valleys, and rendering visible the slope of the land as it meets the ocean.

Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy come to mind when thinking of Erickson’s investigations of the natural world. In the work of both Long and Goldsworthy, there is a quiet, meditative aspect. Long, for example, walks great distances and considers his walks as much his art as the circles of clay or stones that he exhibits in galleries.

Sometimes he walks back and forth over a field of grass or along damp sand on a beach creating a line that describes the shape of the land. At other times, he rearranges stones he finds when walking into basic shapes like circles. This private work is made known to a larger audience through photo documentation that later appears in galleries.

Goldsworthy works similarly, usually in secluded areas. He has created delicate sculptural forms, resembling shells or cocoons, out of leaves folded and woven together. On occasions, he may rearrange the debris on the forest floor into natural-appearing patterns. Most of the works Long and Goldsworthy create are ephemeral, lasting only as long as nature allows.

While Erickson creates objects in more conventional and archival media, his concentration on elemental shapes inspired by nature and the earthy tones of his palette link his work to that of environmental artists. There is about Erickson’s work an aspect of fragility; the forms he creates hover on an edge between life and decay or appear as though they are about to fly away or dissolve. He has absorbed and beautifully translates the truisms of natural forms, that its structure and material is both strong and delicate and that its presence can be long lasting but also transient. Erickson’s attention to the natural environment is not a political stance. He does not intend to plead for ecological activism, at least, not overtly. Like Long and Goldsworthy, Erickson respects the environment and finds it in the content of his work. Through the objects he makes, he draws attention to his belief in a basic human need for connection to the earth. In today’s fractured and complex society, Erickson’s desire for simplicity and connectedness, his respect for the beauty of natural forms, and his effort to convey his sense of wonder and discovery is especially compelling.