Life’s Rhythms Abound in Art and Poems at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery Exhibit

Complementary neighbors fill the two halves of Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery this month. Ernest Silva’s paintings and mixed-media constructions exude a seriousness laced with humor, while the poems oD. Snodgrass and accompanying etchings by DeLoss McGraw titter with whimsy and just an edge of darkness. Both shows embody a balance of tension and release that mimics life’s own rhythms, and both toss out puns and punch lines when the mood turns excessively somber.

Silva, who teaches at UC San Diego, uses symbols and surrogates to speak of the individual’s perilous journey through time in his show, titled “The Rogue’s Gallery.” Natural disasters and other vague, extenuating circumstances always seem to mire this passage toward knowledge, enlightenment or artistic self-realization, but the journey persists. Silva evokes this image of the individual coursing through life in the form of a small, slat-framed canoe, subjected to tumult after tumult, but enduring with stoicism and integrity.

In “Voyage Above the Volcano,” a cone of wound, tied and tangled wooden rods spits up loops of blue. A small, red canoe bobs innocently in the eruption, askew but intact. “Errant Ship, Night Storm” sets the boat on its end within a cyclone of slim blue coils. A man’s hat, smudged with black and blue paint, dangles from the lower end, toward the floor, residue of the lost soul tossed and dismissed by the sea’s fury.

“Lighthouse” extends the metaphor by juxtaposing the canoe, enmeshed in calligraphic coils, with a painting of a lighthouse. The boat balances on a low gold table, set between two handcrafted wooden chairs. Its tenuous journey takes place in the real space of life, while the lighthouse, seductive beacon of safety and security, remains elusive, an image on the wall far from physical reality.

Though subjected to stress and strain, the canoe never splinters, cracks or shatters from the pressure. Like the voyage and the voyager it represents, it simply endures. The solitude of the journey is echoed in Silva’s painting “A Planet Alone, in a Sky Alone,” a gloriously hued portrait of a man staring pensively before the sea. A coral moon hovers in the violet-stained sky, casting a luminous glow on the man’s cheek and neck. Insistent strokes and cross-strokes of black and violet shadow the other side of his face.

Van Gogh’s gestural, impassioned brush strokes come to mind here, as do Picasso’s fractured female faces in another of Silva’s works, “Heart of Darkness.” Silva’s self-consciousness as an artist working in a long and hallowed tradition surfaces frequently in this work, all from 1988 and 1989.

His “Self-Portrait” invites symbolic interpretation of his identity. A canoe is central, of course, docked atop a yellow chest of drawers--container of memories, histories, the artist’s raw materials. A house-shaped cage perches atop the boat, a tie suspended from its front wall and a faux corn-cob pipe protruding from it as well. A painter’s palette hangs within the cage, as if a compulsion to create, trapped within the artist’s body.

Like all of Silva’s work here, the “Self-Portrait” is painted using mostly primary colors and black and white. Within this limited range, Silva conjures highly evocative sights and scenes. In his artist’s statement, he cites the influence of Clyfford Still’s “jagged nocturnal vision,” as well as the symbolic narratives that materialize in his own dreams. Silva’s work has the power to beget yet more dreams, a testament to the subtle power of his vision and the trance-like effect of his flickering black and blue seas.

Across the gallery, the words of W. D. Snodgrass engage in a gentle volley with the images of DeLoss McGraw. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet serves softly but with surprising bite, and the Southern California artist responds in kind, with a smile framed in the color of blood. Snodgrass and McGraw’s collaboration began in 1981 with a letter from the artist to the author. It has thrived ever since, because of an obvious affinity of spirit and the freedom, as Snodgrass has put it, to misunderstand each other.

“Midnight Carnival” represents their most recent endeavor, a book of 10 poems and 10 etchings published last year by San Diego’s Brighton Press. As in their earlier collaboration, “A Colored Poem,” published in 1985 and also shown here, the works in “Midnight Carnival” act “in dialogue” with each other. The words, as much as the images, float, bounce, frolic and ponder their way through 10 familiar facets of a carnival--the hall of mirrors, the fire-breather, the high-wire act, the alluring carnival girl, the tattooed man.

Snodgrass meanders through the melee--the fears, fantasies and dampened dreams that descend upon a new town every week. McGraw’s visual slices of the feast don’t always match Snodgrass’ in depth and poignancy, but, with only a few well-placed hues, they can push the tone from fantastic to phantasmic or from whimsical to wry.

McGraw takes total liberty with his subjects, twisting their arms into loops and pinching their cheeks to bright crimson orbs. Like Snodgrass, however, his childlike frivolity and extravagance with form is tempered by the knowing--or at least suspecting--despair of adults. This dualism of frolicking and foreboding forms is discussed in an astute foreword to the book by Robert L. Pincus and is epitomized by the mix of dark mystery and radiant fun in the book’s own title, “Midnight Carnival.”

A poetry reading by Snodgrass will be held in the gallery (1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos) at 7 p.m. Oct. 6. The shows continue through Oct. 11.