PROFILE – JUNE 2008

By Joshua Bodwell

Photography Darren Setlow

 

A Portland design team captures the gestures of nature

If connection is a gift—a lightning spark between seemingly disparate things—then reconnection is a blessing.

 

For Friederike Hamann and Colin Sullivan-Stevens connection came while they were both attending the Rhode Island School of Design—Hamann all the way from her native Germany and Sullivan-Stevens from his home in Freeport. Years after graduating, the pair reconnected in Maine. Today, working under the moniker Field, the couple is creating large wall paintings that are connecting and reconnecting home interiors to the natural landscape beyond their walls. Additionally, Hamann and Sullivan-Stevens—who are 31 and 36 years old respectively—maintain a space on Portland’s India Street that is as much a living, evolving work of art as it is a gallery showcasing their paintings, object designs, and print work.

Although New England has a long history of murals (“It must have nearly as many wall paintings as Italy!” speculates Hamann) and Sullivan-Stevens has actually spent time restoring historical murals, Field’s work is not easily classified as such. Applied directly to the wall by hand—sometimes massive and sweeping, other times intimate and delicate—Field’s creations are perhaps better described as “environmental wall paintings.” The couple intends their work to accentuate the experience of an architectural space, rather than distract from it as figurative art or more pictorial murals might.

 

Field’s paintings feature tree branches, blades of grass, leaves, water, flowers, birds, nests, and moons, but they are not so much representational as they are a reaction to landscape and nature. “When Fidi and I are painting a tree branch, for instance,” says Sullivan-Stevens, “it’s not about making it perfect, but capturing the gesture of a branch.” The work is often bold and graphic, and nearly always creates a captivating tension between positive and negative spaces.

 

“They are very pattern based,” says Hamann of the wall paintings.

 

“But not like a wallpaper,” Sullivan-Stevens quickly adds. “Our pieces are more like nature—you don’t see the same thing twice.”

 

In some of their work, the natural connections are obvious: the real-life model for the sprawling pine they painted up the staircase of one home is visible outside if one peers out a nearby window. In other works, the connection is more subtle. In a Greek Revival house in Freeport, they photographed the tips of goose feathers, then projected the enlarged photos onto the walls and traced the hypnotic pattern. The effect is striking, but the casual observer might not know at first glance that they are even feathers, or that the homeowner had kept geese for many years.

 

“Every project is very unique,” says Hamann, “unique to the architecture and to the space outside.”

 

“And especially to the people,” says Sullivan-Stevens.

 

While using photo projections is not uncommon for Field, they almost always work freehand with paint or colored pencils. “But I think even the imaginative approach is, for us, trying to create something as good as nature,” admits Sullivan-Stevens. All of their pieces shimmer and ripple with the visual subtleties and nuance that can come only from freehand work. It is the small imperfections, if you will, that elevate Field’s murals above much commercial art. “I think the spontaneity in our wall paintings comes directly from the brushstrokes,” says Hamann.

 

Many people, it seems, are taking notice of Field’s unique talents. Over the past winter, Hamann and Sullivan-Stevens traveled to Los Angeles to create a massive, permanent wall painting for the new 4,000-square-foot Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers showroom. In the sort of enormous commercial space that is so common on the West Coast—which includes laminated Douglas fir trusses from the early 1930s, big skylights, and poured-concrete walls—Field painted leafless black cherry trees in various transparent hues onto wood panels.

 

Back home in Maine, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport is showing a Hamann and Sullivan-Stevens exhibition entitled Light Plant until early June. Field’s work has, on occasion, explored the intersection of art, nature, and technology, and Light Plant is an ambitious engagement with this theme. One of the exhibition’s central pieces is a wall covered with 2,000 hand-painted wildflower seed packets. Each packet represents a single pixel in a photograph of wildflowers that has been magnified on a computer screen. The work seems to undulate on the wall, and the viewer is invited to consider how modern computing and communications are redefining our perception of the natural world. “It’s our image of nature seen through a piece of technology,” explains Hamann.

 

“C’mon, the Impressionists were working with pixels a long time ago,” jokes Sullivan-Stevens.

 

Back in their studio at 75 India Street, Hamann and Sullivan-Stevens perpetually use their narrow, tin-ceilinged space like a ship, voyaging to discover new territories. Each month, in conjunction with Portland’s First Friday Art Walk, the couple creates a new themed exhibit, often using the season as a touchstone. On the space’s door, the word “Field” is emblazoned in a rugged Roman type.

 

“It’s a simple word,” says Hamann, “very open. And nature is our major inspiration.”

 

“There is something a bit vague about the word field,” says Sullivan-Stevens, “but everyone can also relate to it in some way.”

 

“And it even has an emotional quality, because it almost sounds like feel,” Hamann chimes in, as though the idea has just struck her.

 

“Really?” says Sullivan-Stevens with a grin. “You think so?”

 

The two laughingly debate field versus feel for a moment. One can almost imagine the couple working out a wall design in this same manner, the two of them throwing an idea back and forth.

 

To call Field a “business” seems strange. The custom work the couple produces almost defies such classification—it is art, it is connection.