Passion Paintings: The Art of Patty Wickman

Gordon Fuglie

AT THE CUSP of high summer in the last year of the second millennium, the international readership of the New York Times Magazine for Sunday, June 27, must have been bemused to discover—of all things—a feature on collegiate art schools in southern California ("How to Succeed In Art"). Reading on, one realized that art critic Deborah Solomon's piece addressed two topics: the ideological tendencies that currently dominate the Master of Fine Arts programs at U.C.L.A. and Art Center College of Design (Pasadena), and the art star phenomenon that marks many of the teachers and graduates from these "power art schools." In the course of her article, there emerged a formula for success for the young, self-styled "cutting edge" artist in these academies: first, abandon (or at least subvert) traditional drawing and painting skills and disciplined craft; second, supplant the study of art history with deconstructionist theory; third, with your colleagues, engage in frequent, prolonged, and heated critique sessions about your and their work; fourth, produce a new-genre work (e.g. video, installation, performance, or combination thereof) as a form of cultural critique; fifth, connect with a commercial gallery specializing in marketing your work as a novel art commodity; sixth, cultivate your status as an art super star and bask in the rewards of the culture you have critiqued. In her investigation of this new academy system, Solomon seemed dubious that any time-tested or memorable art could be produced.

Just who are the academic mentors responsible for this approach to educating young artists in southern California? A captioned photograph heading the last page of Solomon's article presented a line-up of "some of the power art faculty at U.C.L.A.," whose select company includes John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Barbara Kruger, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, and Nancy Rubins. In the realm of institutionalized contemporary art, these faculty are certified international postmodernist art stars, inhabiting at once all of the points of its four-square structure: academic professorship, museum recognition, critical acclaim, and commercial gallery representation.

All of these artists have built careers on sensational work and/or publicity events. Baldessari had himself photographed cremating his paintings; Burden documented himself being shot with a rifle and, later, crucified with nails on the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle; Kruger, a visiting faculty member, is known for her monumental photo-text graphics with their feminist sloganeering; McCarthy stages and videotapes neo-Dionysian performances with rubber-masked figures engaged in provocative, often highly-sexualized behavior, slathering themselves in ketchup, mayonnaise, etc.; Pittman's large, noisy canvases are often arrayed with depictions of genitalia and sexual content from the gay subculture; among Ray's provocative sculpture is a life-size sex orgy with multiple representations of himself as participant and an actual-size sculptural reconstruction of a fatal car wreck; Rubins constructs precarious, towering piles of discarded mattresses, water heaters, and other detritus from consumer society.

But the photo in the Times did not include all of U.C.L.A.'s teaching artists: not pictured or discussed were full-time faculty Barbara Drucker, Roger Herman, Adrian Saxe, and Patty Wickman. They were presumably left out of the line-up because their careers didn't fit the skeptical angle of Solomon's piece. Drucker, a humanist known to be disillusioned with the market-driven, star-struck art scene, once established an alternative gallery in her own house, makes art in a poetic, personal vein, and champions art education starting in childhood. Herman, a painter/printmaker in the modernist European tradition and whose work authoritatively connects with and updates German Expressionism, recently opened an alternative gallery for younger and student artists. Saxe, the most senior member of the art faculty, is a ceramist whose highly crafted hybrid sculpture works on two levels: it is warmly, humorously anthropomorphic, and it offers a range of sly perspectives on history, society, and culture. Wickman is a figurative and narrative/allegorical painter whose recent work engages themes from the Bible and art history, and is a "self-outed" practicing Catholic. None of these artists could be mistaken for deconstructionist, new-genre, art-market super stars; "power faculty" is not the term one would associate with their teaching and art careers.

While these "other" U.C.L.A. art faculty broadly share similar artistic and humanistic concerns that differentiate them from their "power faculty" colleagues, I will focus on Patty Wickman's life and work as a Catholic artist. When I asked Wickman about her artistic influences, she recalled that as a child her first important encounter with sacred art was in the Saint Andrew and Holy Family churches in the Pasadena area:

St. Andrews is a large church with high, vaulted ceilings. The focal point of the church is an enormous portrait of God the Father that hovers over the altar. Primarily in tones of gold, it both radiates and emanates light. What most impressed me about the church was the simultaneous sense of awe and holy fear it inspired—feeling dwarfed by the space and being made physically aware of the greatness of God and His creation.

At Holy Family, she was especially taken with the two large paintings near the altar: one features a luminous Virgin suspended in Glory, the other a chiaroscuro scene in which Christ comforts a dying man whose soul rises to heaven. As an undergraduate in college, Wickman settled on art as her major, matriculated, and continued on to graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Earning the M.F.A. in 1983, she completed her studies with her fundamental identity unchanged: a practicing Catholic grounded in the liturgy and rituals of the Church. Moreover, her Catholicism undergirded her vocation (not career) as an artist. Following graduate school, she returned to her parents' home to explore new directions for her work and seek college and university teaching positions.

Like many contemporary Christian artists who are figurative painters and desire to impart biblical values or stories in their work, Wickman first struggled to find a visual language that was current, yet linked to traditions in the history of art that were important to her. Casting about for a content that she thought would convey both familiarity and mystery to a late twentieth-century audience, she began taking photographs of her father, who was bed-ridden from a back injury, and her mother, who practiced relaxation by doing slant board exercises. The resulting images depicted dark, disturbing, and mysterious scenes, as decontextualized through the camera's distancing lens and the artificial interior lighting. From these troubling, recumbent figurative photo studies, she developed the content that marked her work from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s.

In 1984, she accepted a teaching position at San Jose State University; a year later she joined the art faculty at U.C.L.A., where she is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing. During her tenure at San Jose, Wickman began to produce a number of large, color-highlighted grisaille canvases depicting, in chiaroscuro tableaux, nude, partially clad, and clothed figures performing strange rituals.

The Promise of Eternal Summer [see Plate 1], produced in Los Angeles, is one of the more ambitious efforts from this body of work. The sketchily rendered, mysterious scene is laid out in three registers: foreground, middle ground, and background—a compositional device long used in Western narrative painting. A "net" of cut flowers suspended by strings unites the three registers of the picture plane. In the foreground, a grimacing nude man lying on his back appears to be attending to the flowers, only to get tangled in the strings. Behind the net, a stock media image of a gardening woman is used to portray humanity cultivating the land, seen here as a terrarium, a figment of nature within the painting. The evocation of a primitive sense of the sacred is made evident by Wickman's third "figure," a brooding female fertility deity from the ancient orient. In the barely visible background are a jumble of chests of drawers and long wooden boxes. Overall, the picture looks like a painting of a performance art piece, an influence that the artist acknowledges for this period of her work.

Like much figurative work in the late twentieth century, the meaning of The Promise of Eternal Summer is not unitary but layered. Along with a number of women artists who were exploring social and gender issues in the 1980s, Wickman wanted to address the increasingly tenuous connection of humanity with nature—especially the relationship between women and nature. The principal motif of the painting, the futility of attempting to preserve fleeting beauty, is apparent in the ironic title of the work and the brightly-lit male figure in the foreground. After witnessing the death of a friend and illnesses in her family, the artist had been reflecting on mortality and the futility of preserving what, in the end, must die. The web of suspended flowers is a ridiculous human attempt at holding on to their beautiful but ephemeral blooming. Cut and hung, the flowers will dry out and disintegrate. The calm, focused labor of the gardening woman suggests the female's "natural" acceptance of the birth-and-death cycle of life, as does the presence of the goddess. In the end, The Promise of Eternal Summer belongs in the tradition of the Dutch Baroque vanitas image, a kind of moralizing still life that sought to remind the viewer of the transience of life.

Central to the portrayal of Wickman's figures is the use of repetitive gesture, whether through ritual, tedious tasks, or compulsive behavior. In The Promise of Eternal Summer, these gestures are evident in the man moving his hand from one dried flower to the next and the woman placing a series of plants in the terrarium. Wickman exploited this concept more fully in a large canvas from 1991, In Our Own Likeness. It depicts three male figures, on hands and knees, looking over an array of world maps. The artist's original idea was to have the figures sorting through endless yards of patterned fabric, cutting out sections to assemble clothing—a task with no end. As Wickman probed the notion of patterns and the imposition of one cut shape onto another, the concepts of control and colonization emerged as motifs. The moral bankruptcy of colonialism—the arrogant stance of the dominator over the subjected—led the artist to portray her colonizers obsessively crawling in their jockey shorts—would-be emperors without clothes. As the crawlers measure and cut up the world, pacing back and forth over the terrain in an attempt to clothe themselves in their geographic conquests, they are futilely pursuing an identity in their attempted appropriation of the other. In this moral understanding, In Our Own Likeness recalls the conventions of Catholic iconography known as the Seven Deadly Vices and the Seven Cardinal Virtues.

Another monumental work, Within (Without) [see Plate 2], 1991-93, depicts an athletic woman, poised like a sprinter, clad only in panties and a brassiere. Unlike the underwear worn by the men crawling across the terrain of In Our Own Likeness, the female's appearance is not satirical. She is stripped for action, and purposeful action at that. Wickman has created a dramatic existential moment by encircling the protagonist with a pool of light; intensifying the scene is a ring of vanity mirrors that are turned inwards on her. The focused illumination of Within (Without) was inspired by the artist's study of Geertgen tot Sint Jans's mystical devotional painting, Madonna of the Rosary (c. 1480). In that Renaissance work, Our Lady and the infant Christ hover in deep darkness, irradiated in a pool of warm light. Geertgen's small panel is a visualization of a moment from the Mass when the priest elevates the monstrance—an ornate device, often in the shape of a flaming sun, that contains a consecrated host, which the congregation recognizes as symbolizing Mary and the child she carries. When the monstrance is elevated, the congregation adores the one who has brought salvation to humanity. By contrast, the viewer recognizes that the crouching female of Within (Without) has arrived at another kind of momentary revelation. The encircling mirrors force her to reckon with who she is in the revealing light. Further, the painting evokes contemporary women's issues of entrapment and anxieties of being constantly observed. There seems little doubt, however, that the illuminated figure—on her mark, muscles taut, eyes fixed—will spring towards liberation.

In 1994, Wickman decided to embark on a formal, five-year course of Bible study taught by a professor from U.C.L.A.'s English department. This deep immersion in scripture was both new and compelling to her; she soon realized that she had been separating her public and artistic life from her private and spiritual life. Moreover, Wickman saw that she "had resorted to cloaking my work" with issues that, while important, were not central to who she was as a Christian artist. During this period, she also sought dialogue with other Christian artists, and her artistic and spiritual lives began to merge.

The first evidence of Wickman's artistic transition was her solo exhibition at the Dan Bernier Gallery, Santa Monica, in 1996. In order to grasp the critical response that she received from this exhibition, one needs to understand its local context. While southern California has become one of the most vibrant art centers in North America, it still lacks a press that is fully capable of critically engaging the art produced there. In this regard, the response to the Bernier show was all the more astonishing: Wickman received six reviews, ranging from positive to enthusiastic. Three of the articles cited the biblical sources and faith issues in her work.

Two of the most notable works from the exhibition were Anonymous (with St. Agatha) [see Plate 3] and A Thief in the Night [see front cover]. Anonymous (with St. Agatha) may well be an icon for our post-biblical age. The painting is grounded in art history: it is, among other things, Wickman's homage to an altarpiece panel by Francisco Zurbarán (1598-1664). The Spanish artist's painting from the 1630s depicts the third-century Christian martyr, St. Agatha, in the garb of a seventeenth-century noblewoman. In Wickman's reproduction, she also portrays the saint holding a platter carrying the severed breasts of her martyrdom—torn from her body when she refused the advances of the pagan Roman governor. Completing the double-figured composition, Wickman offers a contemporary contrast to St. Agatha at the left foreground. A nude woman advances toward the viewer, bearing in her cupped hands a pair of silicone breast implants. Her genitals and face are obscured by digital scrambling, a media device to protect the anonymity of witnesses, and for the artist, a motif to suggest the loss of one's true identity in a consumer society promising cosmetic redemption.

A Thief in the Night is not only Wickman's most biblical allegory to date, it is also arguably her first masterpiece. Drawing on St. Paul's letter to the Thessalonians (5:2) and St. Matthew's gospel (6:19-21, the Sermon on the Mount), the six by nine foot painting is a restrained but gripping cautionary tale. In a spotlighted interior (actually Wickman's and artist husband Tim Hawkinson's studio) a young man and woman stand transfixed before an array of material goods on an oriental carpet. At right, and fixing the couple with his icy gaze, the thief departs through a window, a computer keyboard and silver pitcher in hand. The presence of the dog—symbol of faithfulness—and the absence of art in the picture frames on the back wall are intriguing. But the faithful dog drops his guard to look at us, the viewers, as if encouraging our witness to the folly of storing up treasures on earth. And the empty picture frames? It appears the art has been stolen, too, save one work in the center of the scene. Closer scrutiny and the artist's own admission reveals a nineteenth-century engraving of the Beatitudes—a tip-off that the key to unlocking our human destiny is the joy of possessing the beloved, not loving what we possess. In this regard, the painting's message is Augustinian, a call to the labor of seeing fully by lifting our eyes from all the worldly goods on the carpet to search out the deeper reality of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Wickman's latest paintings turn from the dramatically lit, tenebrous interiors that have characterized most of her past work to events that take place in the light of day. The first solid work in this category is Passion Painting [see Plate 4], which was inspired by the artist's attendance at an outdoor swap meet. In the early morning, Wickman came across a sleeping, young vendor wrapped in a blanket, her head resting on a card table. Intrigued by the symbolic possibilities of the image, Wickman sketched the sleeper for later use in a painting.

Back in her studio, she recalled an image of an Italian Madonna with a single finger emerging from her blue cloak, and transformed the sleeping girl into Mary dreaming of her Son's Passion. The scene takes place in a southern California suburban patio; the backyard, with its symbolic garden statue of a lamb, suggests Gethsemane. Mary's dream as vision is emphasized by the Passion Flower suspended above her head in a Rorschach pattern. Hers is the sleep of inspiration, an exalted anticipation of, and contrast to, the Apostles' sleep that abandons their Lord to his Passion in the garden. Passion Painting also owes its inspiration to a vision St. Gregory had when he was a priest: while he was celebrating the Mass, he saw Christ as the bleeding Man of Sorrows appear above the altar table.

Speaking of both her past and present work, Wickman affirms that her artistic intent lies in her being "drawn to figures and situations that manifest a weakness, vulnerability, or brokenness—situations in which the possibility of grace and redemption are most present." She wants the figures to "maintain a delicate strength, balance, and dignity amidst their surroundings, seeking a state of being within the paintings that is visually analogous to the state of contemplative prayer." This approach isn't likely to make her a star of the contemporary art scene. But Wickman's art, like the state of prayer she seeks to render on her canvases, creates a space wherein we may engage something greater than ourselves. In this sense, Wickman has chosen to forgo the celebrity status of an art star in order to become a celebrant of life's deepest and richest mysteries.

Visit Patty Wickman as Image Artist of the Month for April '02

Issue #25 • Winter '99/'00