JOYCE TREIMAN VENTURES THROUGH ANOTHER TERRAIN WITH LANDSCAPES

Having an extended conversation with Joyce Treiman is a little like being submerged in a pepper pot. She floats you in a bubbling brew of spicy talk about art. She steams over the failure of art schools to educate their students in anything other than “hustling.” She splutters over curators whose knowledge of art history begins with what happened two weeks ago. She erupts in anger over worthy older artists who have been forgotten while inept youngsters are elevated to the top of the marketplace and to prime museum walls.

Then she turns off the fire and bursts into laughter, asking, “Why am I such a misanthrope? I don’t care. No, that’s not true. I do care. That’s the problem, I do care.”

Having stirred the stew of what’s wrong with the art world today, this archetypally feisty redhead shifts you from the light-filled living room of her commodious Pacific Palisades home into a dark, cozy den where she’s instantly embroiled in showing you her new paintings, a catalogue of drawings from a recent Chicago show and old treasures that she has discovered and bought at bargain prices in antique shops. She plies you with coffee and exquisite mints. And when you reluctantly leave, you know you have had an extraordinary experience with a woman who has given you a verbal dose of adrenalin.

Treiman, 62, is a crusty survivor--not only of lung cancer, that has sent her to surgery and through a debilitating bout of chemotherapy, but of a venal, fashion-conscious art world. The latest evidence of her physical tenacity and aesthetic virtuosity will go on view Saturday when Tortue Gallery in Santa Monica opens an exhibition of 47 drawings, done from 1982-84, and 24 small paintings completed last year. (The show will continue to Feb. 16.)

Within the two bodies of work, gallery visitors will see the technical range, historical awareness and energetic spark that have made Treiman one of Los Angeles’ and her native Chicago’s most admired, if not most officially recognized, painters. The figurative drawings--pulling off strange twists between comic and tragic elements--are vintage Treiman, while the paintings are lyrical seascapes and landscapes, mostly based on the Malibu coast.

Friends often accuse Treiman of being perverse--painting dramatic figurative canvases when cool abstraction is in vogue and switching to abstraction when the stylistic tables are turned. She revels in the thought of subverting a restrictive system but this maverick admits to no such plan.

In recent years--and in the current show--she has moved freely from disturbing visions to comforting landscapes. Her last exhibition at Tortue was saturated with images of death (eerily foreshadowing her illness), while an earlier show brought the spirit and light of Monet’s waterlilies to her paintings of the Venice canals.

Pointing to a drawing with a funeral wreath in one corner, she said, “People will want to know what happened to Treiman again when they see this, but now that I look back, I see that I have always gone from heavy, heavy (subjects) to nature. It’s sort of a release.”

The heavy side of the show at Tortue contains depictions of such things as a skeleton riding a horse, some puzzling “Incidents” and a group of works involving human “Jokers.” The “Jokers,” who allude to life’s tricks, wear masks or top hats, like the “tacky” fellows who entice tourists to ride horse-drawn carriages around the chic streets of New York.

Treiman says her process of combining separate images in drawings resembling sketchbook pages is “not intellectual, it just feels right. If I tried to plan it, I couldn’t do it. I like the ambiguity, where everyone can contribute something. In the end, it’s the thing you can’t explain that makes art great. You can’t plan that; you luck out.”

She doesn’t previsualize her work but often makes “little thumbnails” as a way of “putting it all down” before selecting what will be used. “It’s incredible the ways that something can be said. The hard part is decisions,” she said.

“The simplest thing is to take one figure and blow it up. The trick is to take all kinds of complications, say five figures, and make it work--now that’s hard. But to take a head and blow it up to six feet, what’s the big trick?”

The lighter, seemingly less complex part of the show was inspired by a drive up the Pacific Coast: “I asked myself, ‘Why am I not doing this (painting the rocks, sand and sea)? Just because it used to sound corny?’ I used to hate cows, but here’s a painting with cows in it. I could do it because I finally saw them as shapes.”

Ill health may have forced Treiman to reduce the size of her paintings and to reconsider landscapes, but she says she was ready for the change: “I had been thinking, ‘Why all these huge things? Why all the bombast?’ And then I got interested in leaving people out and looking around. It’s interesting how you really begin to see nature when you’ve been sick.”

If there’s one thing that distinguishes Treiman’s varied work, it is historical roots. “I always carry great paintings around in my head,” she confirmed. “That and what I see and feel come out in the work. I’m influenced by travel, too, but the paintings always refer to what I’ve felt. I have to be moved by something.”

When she rages against current art education and its emphasis on careerism, Treiman does so out of concern that young artists are being shortchanged: “If you don’t know the best art, you’re producing sophomoric work--dirty pictures, bad drawing. What’s going to happen to these kids for the rest of their lives? Are they stuck (like Julian Schnabel) pasting plates? I have to live to be 100, I have so much work to do.”

Since her training with Philip Guston at the University of Iowa (then “the Athens of the Middle West,” according to Treiman) and her youthful exposure to the fine collections of the Chicago Art Institute, Treiman has gravitated toward “the highest examples of any period.” She has drawn sustenance from Rembrandt, Bonnard, Monet, Degas and other grand masters she calls “beacons who light the way,” but her range of reference never sits still.

“Remember Goya’s dwarf?” she asked, pointing to a foreshortened likeness of herself (reminiscent of the dwarf) in “Seated Joker Self Portrait.” “Well, here I am.”

With all of art history, nature and personal experience as sources, does she ever have dry spells? “Oh, please. I used to get them, when I was young. I thought that everything had to be of major importance. I used to think--well, I still have a tendency to think--that a major painting needs a major concept.

“With age and experience, you realize it isn’t what you paint, it’s the quality. A rock can be absolutely marvelous.”