WOMEN AND ART: TWO EXHIBITS AT THE HAY GALLERY

VISAGE BY RACHAEL EASTMAN

NEW WORKS BY MARY B. HARRINGTON
On View at The Hay Gallery in Portland, Maine
From May 27 to June 29, 2003

By Laurie Meunier Graves

Every artist is either a man or a woman and the struggle is pretty much the same for both. All art that is not communal is, so to speak, made at home.
—Elizabeth Hardwick

Not long ago, as I was driving home from a meeting, I listened to the inimitable Peter Schickele on Public Radio. His show that night was entitled “Cherchez la Femme,” and Mr. Schickele had prepared a little test for his radio audience. He was going to play four different pieces of music, and we were to guess which pieces were composed by women and which pieces were composed by men.

Fortunately, I was driving on a quiet highway, and I was able to pay close attention to the music. “Rats,” I thought as I listened, “I can’t tell whether men or women composed these pieces.” However, I could hear differences in style. One had a classical sound; another had a jazzy, Gershwin sound; still another had a baroque sound; and there was one I couldn’t place. Of course Mr. Schickele had a little surprise for us: it turned out that all the pieces were composed by women. But my ear had heard correctly. The piece that had the classical sound came from the second half of the 1700s, the one that reminded me of Gershwin came from the 1920s, and the one that had a baroque sound came from the first half of the 1700s. What I heard was not gender but rather the sound of an era. (The one I couldn’t place was by Amy Beach.)

Since then, I have been thinking about gender and the arts. Does being a man or a woman influence the type of art produced or rather does the time in which the art is made have more of an effect? In other words, is it nature or nurture?

With these questions in mind but leaning heavily toward the nurture side, I recently went to the Hay Gallery in Portland   to see two exhibits that featured women. One is Visage by Rachael Eastman and the other is New Works by Mary B. Harrington .

The Hay Gallery is upstairs over a Starbucks shop, and the whole place smells like coffee. Downstairs, on a wall in the foyer of the gallery, is a huge orange, white, yellow, and red abstract painting of a face as serene as the Buddha’s or the Virgin Mary’s. The painting is Inner Smile by Rachael Eastman and it is part of her Visage exhibition. Visage, of course, is the French word for face, and faces are what greet you when you go upstairs to the large, bright Hay Gallery. There are big faces and small faces and blue faces and orange faces and brown faces. Most of the large paintings are faces with the eyes closed, and they have the same serene aspect as Inner Smile.

Many of the smaller faces also look calm and peaceful, but here there is more variation. Nymph, which is one of my favorites, has a puckish, mischievous expression. Others seem wistful and melancholy.

As I stood in the gallery and studied all the different faces, I was struck by how it seemed as though a thin veil or a translucent medium covered them, the way a face is seen in either the memory or the imagination. Ms. Eastman has caught some elusive, inner essence, and by focusing on the face, she has managed to portray the soul, to catch “Lady Grace.”

Is this a feminine perspective? My first inclination is to say that it is. However, I thought back to a trip I took to the National Gallery in Washington, D. C. and a room that was full of paintings, done during the Renaissance, of the Virgin Mary. As I mentioned before, these paintings of the Virgin have the same shining aspect that Ms. Eastman’s faces have. And, men did most of those Renaissance paintings. They, too, caught “Lady Grace.”

Mary B. Harrington’s work, which is in another room, has an entirely different perspective. Some of the paintings are of landscapes and some are of figures with flowing robes. The figures are tall, for the most part featureless, and have the remote look of a myth or a fairy tale. However, these wonderful paintings do have a cool serenity that is akin to the serenity found in Ms. Eastman’s paintings. The approaches couldn’t be more different, yet somehow they complement each other in feeling.

Ms. Harrington, who works at the gallery on weekends, was kind enough to offer me seltzer water and talk about her paintings. When I told her that I was thinking about feminine and masculine perspectives in art, she told me that she did feel as though her work was painted from a feminine perspective. But then again, it’s hard for artists to separate themselves from their work.

I looked closely at her paintings, which according to the gallery handout “slip from the abstract to the representational.” Eire Landscape, which is one of my favorites, has a broad sweep of blue sky and deep green grass with a little glimmer of water. With what looks like a few well-placed strokes of the brush, Ms. Harrington has managed to convey an entire vivid landscape. (However, I certainly could be wrong about the few well-placed strokes of the brush. Looks can be misleading.) The simplicity of this picture is appealing and deceptive. Go ahead and try to paint a picture like this. See what you get.

The same is true for Water’s Reedy Edge. Again, a few strokes of color tell the story of a pond or a marsh.

In Into the Distance, a woman in a robe looks over the water. It reminded me of one of Will Barnet’s paintings and again, as with Ms. Eastman’s paintings, I was struck by how the mood of the painting transcended gender.

Naturally, it is impossible to draw conclusions about gender and art after only seeing two exhibits, but this is something I will be thinking about as I study other exhibits, listen to music, and read books and articles. While being perfectly willing to acknowledge exceptions, I’m still inclined to go with the nurture explanation. However, I plan on keeping an open mind. So stay tuned.

In the end, perhaps none of this really matters. Perhaps what really counts is that women artists are finally taking their place alongside men in galleries and museums. This, of course, has not always been the case. As Ms. Harrington pointed out, there have always been women painters, but most of them weren’t recognized. (Yes, there were exceptions. Georgia O’Keefe comes to mind. But I think it’s safe to say that until recently, exhibits by men outnumbered exhibits by women.) I am happy to report that this is changing in Maine as well as for the rest of the country. There is no longer any need to “cherchez la femme.” They are among us, and it’s about time.

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