COLLEGE EXHIBIT : SCULPTOR GIVES LIFE TO FIGURES

Sculptor Barbara Spring imbues her life-size figures with personalities and life histories that tend to suggest more flesh and blood than wood.

Take the case of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Carving, two figures made for each other. When Spring decided to display them separately at a show several years ago, Mrs. Carving was sold--leaving Ernest without a wife.

“I was disappointed in some ways because I wanted those two together and I should never have put them up for sale alone,” Spring said in an interview this week. But instead of despairing, she decided to have some fun.

“I had him flirting with one of the other figures in a party in one show,” she recalled. “Finally I got him a new wife--younger.”

Spring’s work is the the subject of an exhibit that opened Thursday at Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery on the Santa Ana campus. The exhibit runs through April 3.

For the show, Spring has assembled a scene she calls “Reading Room.” In a space lined with bookshelves, a single mother sits reading at a desk, a toddler at her feet. Her stack of books includes titles on investment--”She’s business-minded,” explains Spring--and a couple on single parenting: “Working Mother’s Manual” by Bee Hardy and “Go It Alone, Mama” by Alma Martyr. Making up titles for her books--all carved from wood--is one of Spring’s favorite pastimes.

Across the room, a man and woman stand talking, while a boy sits reading on the floor and another boy stands alone in a corner. “He looks sort of waiflike, as though he didn’t have a home,” Spring said.

Such scenes, Spring said, are constantly evolving. “These things haven’t all come together at once. They take me years sometimes, and I’ll switch them around occasionally.”

The 70-year-old artist, a resident of rugged Big Sur on the Northern California coast, has been creating these free-standing wood figures since the mid-’70s. Critics have praised the combination of their rough-hewn quality, recalling folk art, with Spring’s sophisticated wit and insight.

The current show, almost identical to an exhibit last year at the Palos Verdes Art Center, also includes some of Spring’s recent variations on her free-standing figures. “Funeral” (1985), a wall-mounted work at the entrance of the exhibit, shows four formally attired men from behind, at a funeral.

Also on display is 1986’s “Horse’s Hindquarters With Stable,” in which Spring’s depictions of horse’s backsides are shown free-standing, with tails on both sides, in a stable setting. Another essentially two-dimensional work, “Woman With Cats” (1986), is shown on another wall.

Her recent experimentation with flat images, Spring said, grew out of her wooden carvings of dresses on hangers, many of which are on display in the gallery in a setting called “Madame Trousseau’s.”

Spring received a very conservative artistic training in her native England, before and during World War II. “It took me 10 years to get over my training because they have so many rules,” said the free-spirited artist. “I don’t have any rules at all now. I’ve found if you have a lot of rules, it limits your freedom in working with the medium.”

She and her husband moved to New York in 1947 and later lived in San Francisco for 25 years. “Then we got offered this house (in Big Sur), and we couldn’t resist it,” she said. “It’s a beautiful area, but rough. We’re always fighting something, slides or fires.”

Spring works in a studio she built herself from discarded timber and other materials. She carves her figures from laminated pine with a chain saw, using a hammer and chisel only on the face. Her process is largely intuitive, she said.

“I have a very conscious way of starting a piece--I know exactly what I want to do,” she explained. “Then, all of a sudden, my subconscious takes over, and I don’t have to think at all. And it comes out the way it comes out, not at all what I was going to do.”

While viewers tend to focus on the humorous aspects of her figures, Spring said, she herself feels a certain anxiety about them. “There’s a tension between them, a queer tension,” she explained.

Spring said her work differs from that of fellow figurative sculptor George Segal, whose work she admires. “He’s taking that person at that very instant, a dramatic moment,” she said. “I want to show more of what has happened to them in their whole life, not that moment so much.”

The opening of the Spring exhibit marks the beginning of Rancho Santiago College’s Art Week 1987. Workshops, films and lectures are scheduled through the end of Art Week, which culminates in a wearable art auction at 7 p.m. Friday.

More than 150 small works by California artists such as Slater Barron, Kim Abeles, Ray Jacob and others will be sold to benefit the college’s art gallery. Artist Dustin Shuler will be the auctioneer.

For information on Art Week activities, call (714) 667-3177.