THE CANVAS-June 2011 

by Britta Konau

Carol Bass, Dyan Berk, Ellen Rich

Each of the three artists presented here has developed an abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors, and lines that is personally meaningful to her. Carol Bass, Dyan Berk, and Ellen Rich configure these basic elements into various permutations using a range of media—and all three create wall-mounted works that embrace imperfection as part of their artistic process.

Carol Bass

Carol Bass grew up in South Carolina and received her BFA from the University of Georgia at Athens. She has exhibited her work in Maine and New Hampshire and conducts workshops on painting and totem building. Bass was the founder and owner of Maine Cottage, a retail store that sells a collection of colorful furniture, and has published three books on interior design. Her design work is featured in Blanket Chests, recently published by Taunton Press.

Through color and form, Carol Bass aims to give material expression to “the energy that we are all connected with.” Given that this life force is a very real entity to her, it is no wonder that she is drawn to the art of Australian Aboriginal peoples and other non-Western civilizations that express a profound connection to their ancestors. Bass’s deeply held beliefs are palpable in the series of totems she constructs from found objects and paint, and whose titles always refer to a specific person. Another series, called Walking Houses, is made of colorful assemblages of found wood that rest on spindly legs. For this group of works, Bass draws inspiration from oceanside houses in South Carolina and from cultures that build homes on stilt foundations to elevate them above unpredictable waters. Bass, however, views her constructions also as mobile shelters for the spirit.

The artist’s paintings are composed of extremely colorful layers of biomorphic shapes on vibrantly patterned backgrounds. In contrast, her wall reliefs make use of a markedly simpler design while retaining the basic compositional elements of the paintings: three or four wooden shapes with irregular outlines are combined in wonderful interplays of color and form that respond to one another as if engaged in a lively conversation.

Bass’s 2008–2009 relief series Positive Energy Kiss brings to mind flowers of unknown species. However, the pieces’ individual components derive from broken shells the artist collects. Bass shows her appreciation for the marks of their history and rough treatment by arranging them into still lifes that she captures in photographs. These images then become the source material for her reliefs. The two larger forms in Positive Energy Kiss #3 oppose each other like the wings of a butterfly, with the smaller, central shape serving as the connecting and anchoring element. The bright orange underpaint shows through the sparingly applied colors and gives the composition a unifying energy. Whether shells, flowers, or soaring butterflies, Bass’s art is rooted in nature and its nurturing spirit.

Dyan Berk

Dyan Berk grew up in Chicago and received her BFA and BEd from the University of Miami in Florida. She moved to Maine in 1982 and has been living year-round on Monhegan Island since 1992. In 2009, she created a Percent for Art project at the Mount View Elementary School in Thorndike, and her work has been included in the 2004 and 2008 Center for Maine Contemporary Art Biennial Juried Exhibitions.

Dyan Berk highly values spontaneity and playfulness. “My job as an artist is to constantly explore and be curious,” she says. Her inquisitiveness has convinced her that all of life is interconnected—an idea that has become the underlying theme of her art.

From her sketches of nature and the man-made world, not to mention her imagination, Berk develops a vocabulary of colors, forms, and materials that serve as an assortment of individual compositional elements. She playfully calls these features her “cast of characters” and gathers them together while “allowing them to take their own place.” The connections she creates suggest movement, even collision.

Berk uses this approach to create all of her drawings, collages, fabric sculptures, and three-dimensional installations. She often recycles materials, including stuffed animals and even her own works. The former she collects from Goodwill stores and yard sales before reconfiguring them into bizarre specimens of botany and animal life.

The individual elements of Big Wheel are gathered on top of each other into a cohesive composition that is defined and unified by thick black outlines. The lowest layer of ragged-edged forms feature parallel lines reminiscent of topographical maps, while other forms reach out like an aquatic growth. Crowned by benevolently rounded, petal-shaped forms and a yellow orifice with blue, toothlike protuberances, Big Wheel suggests a strange, slightly menacing plant, or perhaps a symbolic combination of earth, water, fire, and air. A more benign and formal interpretation may see Big Wheel as a tension between hard edges and soft curves, colored fields and black lines. Yet the yellow dots also evoke incandescent light bulbs, and in the end this may be one big carnival ride.

Ellen Rich

Ellen Rich was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and now divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Spruce Head, Maine. She received an MA in art education from the Massachusetts College of Art and a diploma and certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been featured in juried competitions and in solo and group exhibitions in California, Maine, and Massachusetts.

Ellen Rich’s colorful abstractions have a vivacity that reflects the artist’s bubbly, fun-loving nature. She works mostly with circles, ovals, and other organic shapes, and she carefully selects her colors for both their contrast and harmony. These colors and shapes are brought together in dense configurations in which they vie for space and dominance, creating fields of highly dynamic tension. Rich’s motto: “More is more.”

The artist often uses non-art materials and works in unusually diverse formats: paintings on sheets of plastic; shaped works on paper that are backed by cheesecloth and hung directly on the wall; painted cleaning cloths that are attached to a canvas support; and wall constructions made of found wood, Styrofoam, and other materials. But her work always remains anchored to the two-dimensionality of the wall while displaying the imperfection of its execution—an intentional quality that appeals to the artist “because it reflects life as we know it.”

Rich’s three-dimensional wall construction Green Balls is an agglomeration of green and yellow spheres with two spidery stalks protruding above— suggesting that this juicy fruit has just been plucked. It is an image of organic fecundity if not overt sexuality. “In my work, I can express things I could not otherwise say,” says the artist. Many of her shapes imply voluptuous femininity, and much of the material she uses carries connotations of domesticity. Not surprisingly, her images have always had autobiographical meaning for Rich, and she explains the recurrence of similar shapes in her works this way: “The more I mature as an artist, the more I believe that artists are born with their own batch of images imprinted somewhere in their brains.”