Care and kineticism: David Hicks's "Fixing Hair"
Portraits are paintings that look back. We know that the sitter doesn’t actually see us, but part of us — the part that secretly believes in ghosts — suspects that there’s an essence in the frame that is oriented outward. As anybody who has ever ventured into a family picture gallery could tell you, that can be uncomfortable. Art appreciators will sometimes say that the eyes of great portraits follow viewers around the room. They’re less upfront about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Do they chase you like the admiring glances of a lover, or do they stick with you like a guilty conscience?
Maybe it’s a little of both. Portraits ask for more engagement than other kinds of paintings do, and that engenders excitement and a certain sense of responsibility. A good portraitist conjures up a person for you to deal with and then puts her in your way. Jersey City artists have done a lot of this lately. They’ve shook off the introversion of the lockdown period and its aftermath and externalized their feelings. We’ve seen shows like that at 150 Bay Street and MORA. Now Drawing Rooms (926 Newark Ave.) presents “Everyday People,” and it’s the most boisterous, most extroverted one of all. Curator Anne Trauben has hung eighty different pieces of various sizes in the big gallery space, which means that you, visitor, will have more than one hundred and sixty eyes on you. She makes you feel them.
"You Said You'd Never Forget Me"
Some stares are more penetrating than others. The subject of Sara Kohrt’s aching pastel “You Said You’d Never Forget Me” practically hurls his face at the viewer, with each of his eyes a black olive graced by a little white triangle from a distant light source. Kohrt makes her lines thick and heavy, and smears them as if to suggest that the man she’s depicting has been crying with his whole face. Everything is frowning, all is as aqueous as a teardrop: his drooping eye-sockets, the slope of his hair, the narrowness of his face-shape. He’s determined to register an impression on you and leave you with something you can’t shake, even if it’s just an after-image of the pain of his rejection.
David Ort takes a different route to a similar destination. Instead of the verticality of Kohrt’s grief-struck subject, his “Face 2” makes its impression through roundness. Through strokes of bright oil stick on paper, he summons a colorful face from the beige beyond, and emphasizes its concentric circularity. The astonishment in his wide-open eyes is underscored by the artist’s careful circumnavigation of them with pigment-stick. His nose is a little round ball, his red lips form an expectant O, and his ears are graced by arcs of orange that make him look a bit like he’s wearing headphones. It’s all approachable and edge-free, with every pleasant curve a guarantee of friendliness.
David Ort's astonishing "Face"
Trauben lets these two characters peer at each other from across the room. That’s a typical move from a curator who always generates storytelling momentum through juxtaposition. She’s struck on something important about the late Sly Stone’s timeless 1968 hit that she’s named this thirty-nine artist group show after. It’s not merely its egalitarianism that makes it compelling. It’s also Stone’s notion that “everyday people” means so many people: more people than you can handle, in more shapes and sizes than your mind can accommodate, an ever-turning kaleidoscope of humanity, a rock tumbler of emotions, a red one, a green one, and scooby dooby dooby. Such is the crowded experience of living in a world like ours, and if we’re going to survive it, we’d better broaden our empathy and frame of reference, and expand our understanding of what it might mean to be a human being.
Thus, Trauben has chosen to include portraits that contain two people, or more people, or a person and a dog, who, as pet-owners (and artists) know, is just a person closer to the ground. This is unusual for Jersey City portrait shows. Generally, curators ask viewers to pay attention to one subject at a time — and then space those subjects out lest they feel like passengers on the PATH at rush hour. But “Everyday People” is all about rubbing elbows. In Pauline Chernichaw’s acrylic on paper, “Mark With Cigarette” hovers just over the shoulder of a woman, and the hot smoke from his burning butt curls up to the top of the picture and makes a proprietary claim on the atmosphere. Mark, presumably, is the name of the man, but it’s also what the man is making. He’s shoehorned in at an angle behind her, and his eyes and mouth are slanted, as if he’s shimmying to get into position in a too-crowded frame. In Jill Kimball’s bristling “Three Women,” the middle-aged title characters squeeze onto a sofa. They keep their arms crossed and mouths shut to give each other space, but they’re still practically on top of each other. They’re likely family, and they’ve probably been dealing with this problem their whole lives.
Smoking in the boy's room: "Mark With Cigarette."
Like oh so many of the other “Everyday People” portraits, these pieces have a swift, vigorous, loose appeal that captures the ragged energy of social encounters. No matter how much labor they required — and some of these works surely required plenty — there’s a journalistic quality to all of them, as if the artists saw something that they absolutely had to get down on canvas, or paper, or whatever blank surface was at hand. Laurel Garcia Colvin contributes a series of bracing little pencil drawings on handkerchiefs of alternately frightened and defiant immigrant families. “They Should Have Been Greeted With Flowers,” a portrait of a mother shielding a child from an unseen antagonist that just might be the rest of the world, crackles with urgency. It feels like it was made surreptitiously and smuggled across a police line.
Removed from contemporary controversies but every bit as salient to the present moment is “My Great Great Grandparents,” an oil pastel by Loura van der Meule, a Jersey City artist with acute sensitivity to history. The pair is presented, as nineteenth-century immigrants often are, as stolid and unsmiling, serious, ready for their assignment in the New World but surrounded by signifiers that connect them to the old one. Trauben has, cleverly, hung it near “Jake and Hudson on the F Train,” Seth King’s smart and sharply rendered painting of a young couple on the MTA. It’s a study in connection and division: their bodies seem continuous, and their scarves appear to tie them together, but their heads are tilted in opposite directions, and they sit on either side of a silver pole. Can they hang with a city that is once again on the move, or will the velocity of travel pull them apart?
The subway divides: "Jake and Hudson on the F Train"
It’s not certain that Jake and Hudson are headed for work. But they’re definitely out and about in the city, and their facial expressions — like those of the senior van der Meules — mean business. After a long period of repose, “Everyday People” are engaging with the world around them, bearing expressions of determination and alacrity and meeting the demands of the day. Gillian Stewart’s large-panel “Grocery Delivery” man waits at a light in the middle of a crosswalk, feet on the pedals of his e-bike, dragging his culinary payload. The city around him is beige, but the tools of his trade are captured in full color. The scenery is transient, but his responsibilities are real. Meanwhile, Fern Bass shows us a similar working man, cup in hand, steeling himself at a diner. Those around him have covered their eyes, but he stares into space like he’s seen too much. The oil painter didn’t have to call it “Coffee, Post-Pandemic”: the post-traumatic tone of the piece is visible in every blunt, neurotic brushstroke.
Back to the grind in a defamiliarized world.
Even the quiet domestic scenes in the show feel downright kinetic. In David Hicks’s “Fixing Hair,” a drawing in graphite, an older sister tugs at the mane of her younger sibling. The hairdresser’s concentration is total, as is her sister’s trust in her. Yet we approach this intimate moment as if we’re in a racing car. Even as his subjects sit still, Hicks’s background line is all streaming lines and vectors of speed, and the characters’ limbs appear to be disintegrating. “Un Cholo con Su Xolot,” introduced to us in bold charcoal by David Guzman, wears a Dodgers warmup jacket and high-top sneakers as he sits in his living room. A hairless dog crouches between his legs. The houseplant beside them raises its spikes toward the window and the sky where a full moon hangs. Someone is getting ready to howl.
And what about those who won’t open their eyes? Those who’d rather hit the snooze button a few more times? Andrea Geller has a ragged, troubling, but strangely beautiful oil painting for the sleepyheads: “After the Bath III,” a portrait of an older woman resting her legs in the tub. She might be asleep; she might even be unconscious. Her eyelids and breasts hang heavily and her body has turned the crimson shade of a boiled crab. The smeared daubs and streaks of paint in her portrait are suggestive of a melting wax doll. This character is at rest, but that doesn’t mean you have to be. For everyday people, for better and for worse, the message is the same: dreamtime is over. It’s time to wake up and join the wild, unstable, infinitely rewarding party that’s back underway.
(“Everyday People” is on view at Drawing Rooms through the end of June. The gallery will be open on Thursdays and Fridays from 4 p.m - 7 p.m., Saturdays from noon until 3 p.m., and Sundays from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. There’ll also be Meet the Artists events on Sundays the 22nd and 29th of June.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
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