ART REVIEW : BROCKMAN OFFERS BEARDEN WORKS

Born 72 years ago in Charlotte, N.C., Romare Bearden madehis mark with a cut-out collage technique, but he is also a skilled watercolorist and printmaker. His central theme is the rural black experience much like the one Steven Spielberg chronicles in his Hallmark card of a movie, “The Color Purple.”

Surprisingly, Bearden’s work has an idyllic tone much like the Spielberg film. His pictures have a soft, romantic mood and seem of a distant time and place--partly because of the clothing his figures wear, but more because of the peaceful mood that pervades his work. In touch with nature and simple pleasures, his pictures are punctuated with chickens, picnic baskets, watermelons and rocking chairs. When Bearden’s recipe works, his pictures are charming, occasionally moving. When the souffle caves in, they seem gooey and quaint.

A mini-retrospective at the Brockman Gallery (to May 31) features watercolors, prints and collages done over the last 14 years and draws from three series, titled “Prevalence of Ritual” (which deals with biblical themes), “Jazz” and “Mecklenberg County” (focusing on the artist’s memories of his Southern childhood).

Bearden’s collage technique incorporates elements of Caribbean folk art, fabric patterning and African art, and there’s not much spatial depth in his cheerfully colored pictures. They’re flat and crisply delineated, and the subject matter is sometimes upstaged by their bold design. Bearden adorns his central figures lavishly, dressing them in bright garments and surrounding them with flowers, birds and blue skies. His figures often seem lost in reverie, adrift in those magical moments when the clock grows too lazy to continue its forward march and stops for a merciful minute, giving the world a chance to catch its breath. The scent of honeysuckle hangs heavy in the air and you can almost hear the crickets chirping in pictures of a woman leading a cow through a grassy field or a black farmhand clutching an armful of flowers to his chest.

Bearden’s watercolor technique is looser than his collage style and a still life study of a tangle of green and yellow foliage reads as an atmospheric abstraction. The toughest work in the show--and the only work that deals specifically with the plight of the black man in America--is a series of images depicting slave ships sailing into port. Even these pictures, however, seem strangely sanguine and are very much in keeping with the majority of Bearden’s work, which makes the point that the pleasures of nature belong to every man.