Providence Phoenix

March 27 - April 3, 1 9 9 7

[Art Reviews]

Still, life

Ruth Dealy's depth soundings

by Bill Rodriguez
Ruth Dealy's last three years are on the walls around her, she says as she looks about the sunny white box that is the Happy White Gallery at St. Andrew's School in Barrington.
Dealy's current show (which runs through April 13) is simply titled "Paintings," though it might as well be called "Explosions."
"I was going to call it `Depth Soundings,' but that sounded so ponderous," she says. "But, you know, that's what it is."
Wearing a paint-smeared, fuchsia jogging top, she scans the 14 canvases. Stylish black-framed sunglasses and her trademark cherry red lipstick dominate an animated face.
"What it is is dead friends. Dead friends and family," explains Dealy, 49. "The thought behind it is that I would find them, I would locate them through painting about them. Find them again."
There is no trace of mournfulness in her voice. In fact, her next words are laughed out: "It felt really good!" But after a beat, just long enough for the irony to register, she adds: "Unfortunately, I have so many dead friends. Because of AIDS, mostly."
Yet none of the paintings are portraits, at least not in any ordinary sense.
"I've never done portraits of anyone except myself, because of the way I work. I have to stare at the thing," she says. "And I'm not an abstract painter. Every one of those things are a still life, pretty much."
The 14 paintings are pure expressionism. At first glance they look to be pure abstract expressionism, but looking a bit longer begins to reveal suggestions of objects. Irises are prominent in many, hands in others, but many contain convoluted or abstracted forms that only the artist could identify: dragonflies for a friend whom she identifies with Horseneck Beach, "a small pork roast" for someone who liked them. One friend who committed suicide has the outline of a car in the upper right, and hovering in the middle an object that vaguely resembles a gun; red is prominent on that canvas.
She goes over to the painting labeled #2, which was the first one of the series. A golden hand is making a pushing gesture.
"The hand is saying, `Forget it -- I don't want to remember any of that.' Denial. Pushing back all that information," she explains. "It was almost like a tidal wave. I had just found out that my friend Bertie died. He stopped being a junkie, and when he went to dry out they tested him and he had AIDS. And he decided to keep drying out anyhow which amazed me."
There are other hands in the painting, extended,"sort of trying to touch the information."
Dealy steps over to #4, which she says was a hard one to hang because of its emotional content. Unlike all the others, which are dynamic with gestural black swirls, this one has tidy, confined areas of forms, like crabbed handwriting. "This one's for my father-in-law, who was a heavy-drinking Irish-Catholic doctor who wanted to be a WASP. And he held all his emotions really tight," she says. "It's very deliberate, like he is," she adds, lapsing into present tense.
The painting sequence evolved, though not in a way she had envisioned at the outset, when she expected the work to "come full circle" back to her initial exploration. She had thought that the progression would be mourning, transcendence and then whatever "permanent influence" these people would have upon her. But the three-year, slow-motion catharsis of loss instead left her feeling free.
The content of the paintings also shifted unexpectedly.
"At first I was really specific. Each painting went with one person. But after a while it became more universal for me. By the end -- those last three ones," she says, pointing to the far wall, to the right of the entrance, "it became almost general, about transcendence. The very last one was the one in the middle. It seems almost like a resurrection. Resignation and letting go."
Those most recent paintings contain glittery sheens of silver pigment others have similar washes of gold or pewter. They have the motif of all the paintings here, that of black swirls and black-outlined forms all being on the surface. The effect is to give depth to background areas, as though the black shapes were memories rising up from the unconscious. One of the last works has three scribbles of orange day-glo paint stacked in the center, as though rising up in epiphany. Dealy started making art when she was 21 and has kept on just about every day since. Of course, nowadays she's not as fanatical about it as in her youth: she takes off weekends and school holidays to be with her family. Married 30 years to her social worker husband James, they have boys ages 9 and 15. Until last year she taught painting part-time at Rhode Island School of Design, and has shown at various galleries in the region. She is on the boards of Perishable Theatre and of the annual Art Beat studio tour to benefit Sunrise House. Although the subjects of these paintings were all "very formative people in my life" and she has shed many a tear over them, when the time came to confront the canvases, she found herself feeling distanced.
"I guess the surprise was that I don't really care to tell that truth about the person as much as I do to tell the internal truth of the painting. It was almost clinical," much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's description of a poetry as "strong emotion recollected in tranquillity." Although emotion was her starting point, she says she was surprised at how coolly the artist in her took over. "There was some mourning about the living stuff, where you lost them. But never that they were dead, ever," she says, emphasizing the ever. "So? What else is new? It's going to happen to all of us."