Distant visions
Exploration leads two painters in different directions
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

Ellen Van Fleet's ephemeral collages and Peter Stegall's vibrant gloss enamel paintings are miles apart in terms of means and methodology, yet they make for a felicitous pairing at Jay Jay gallery. Different as they are in approach and effect, the works of both artists have a strong visual impact that makes the show a delight to see.

Van Fleet's searching works continue to explore her internalized musings on nature and the art-making process. In her images of banded rocks, dreamlike landscapes and explosive effusions of daubs and dots, she approaches the psyche as a kind of archaeological dig. While she has left behind, for the moment, specific references to ancient art and prehistoric petroglyphs, she continues to dig deep, presenting images that are layered with painted markings and collaged sections of earlier paintings to form rich and energetic abstractions.

"Barred Rock IV" is a riotous composition of rock forms made up of banded stripes like sedimentary strata built up over millennia. Intense color and curvilinear, snaky forms enliven the composition in which the rock forms reach up like colorful extrusions that wander whimsically in luminous space.

"Mouse Ears," a large unframed piece, is like a Rorschach test, with its symmetrical images of mice with fluffy ears touching noses over a luminous expanse of yellow that suggests an inverted vessel. Van Fleet uses the accidental qualities of watercolor to good effect here. Playing on the puddling and bleeding that watercolor pigments can produce, she gives us a brindled surface that suggests mouse fur, and then provides a humorous counterpoint to the organic passages by collaging decorative floral patterns made up of dots and dashes of color onto the central image.

"Gay Squid Lily," a straight watercolor, is closest in feeling to Van Fleet's last body of work, which refers to Australian aboriginal art in its clusters of ovals and circles coming together and dispersing in spurting flumes of color. But she turns again to her newer layered approach in "Why Vandium Yellow," a complex and writhing image that suggests tropical jungles and undersea worlds. It's a jaunty explosion of fragmented forms dominated by a lovely yellow-green.

Sparer and more suggestive of internalized landscapes are the ethereal "Hot Glue Gun II," with its expanses of tender greens and silvery violets, and "Mark the Green," with its cool green border broken by feathery puddles of paint and its fleshy pink interior enclosing a vertical core of lush markings. In these works, Van Fleet continues to grow and open up new worlds for us to experience.

While Van Fleet's work is open-ended and expansive, Stegall's is arbitrary and reductive. Limiting himself to the most restrictive formal devices - usually four colors applied to paper or wood either in vertical stripes or in simplified curvilinear shapes - he produces dazzling op art. His is a pure art that exercises our eyeballs and delights us with the range of effects that can come from severely limited means and methods.

Using mostly high-keyed, close-valued colors, Stegall makes maximum use of the principle of retinal fatigue, in which staring at one color placed next to another of similar value produces a halo effect when the eye moves from one color to the other.

When Stegall sets down, for example, stripes of black, violet, green and red, the colors begin to vibrate and their auras multiply so that as the eye moves, it may see eight colors or 16 instead of four. The effect is intensified when the colors are closer in tone - pale pink, hot pink, forest green and mint green, for example - setting off a visual buzz that is exhilarating.

Stegall also makes good use of the way colors change in relationship to their placement. In "Kabuki," he places three paintings of curvilinear forms suggesting a Matisse-like torso in a horizontal row. They are done in the same four colors - yellow, red, dark red and violet. The only variation is in the placement of the colors next to each other. But the result is stunning. You would swear that each of the colors is different in the three paintings, yet they are the same.

In one panel, the dark red seems to be maroon, the lighter red a fire-engine tone. The yellow turns lime-green and the violet is a pale pastel shade. In another, the red is similar but the violet turns metallic, the yellow-green is lighter and the dark red turns almost brown. In a third, the yellow-green turns dark while the clear red takes on a brick-red quality, the dark red has a berry tone and the violet turns cool and recessive.

Stegall sometimes uses more subtle tones, as in "Quietly Complementary," an orchestration of blues and gray, and "Earthen," a composition that moves from black to rust to terra cotta to dirt-brown. The curvaceous shapes of these and other pieces sometimes suggest figures, while at other times they seem almost to be abstract personae setting up conversations with each other.

Turning to a larger scale, Stegall reprises three works from the 1990s, vertical stripe paintings on doors, that are as jazzy as anything you have seen. "Primary Concern" - made up of five stripes, three blue and one each of yellow and red - vibrates intensely with simple, joyful color that becomes dizzyingly complex as you gaze at it. "Warm Cold" adds secondary colors to the mix - green, orange and aquamarine - to good effect, and "Lime," with lime-green, navy-blue, forest-green and red stripes, shrieks with ebullient tones.

You would think that works so similar in composition and employing such limited means would get boring, but in Stegall's hands they are fascinating. His optical explorations are literally an eyeful.

New Paintings by Peter Stegall and Ellen Van Fleet
WHERE: Jay Jay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
WHEN: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through June 19
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999