Wonder of Life Bathes Carnwath’s Canvases

For all the seeming frivolity of her name, artist Squeak Carnwath takes as her subject nothing less than the meaning of life, its fragility, gravity and wonder. In her recent paintings, on view through Wednesday at the San Diego State University Art Gallery, she yearns to grasp the whole, to seize that instinctual equation between hope, faith and fear that activates humanity.

Her efforts are both poignant and painfully sincere.

The artist, who lives and works in Oakland, layers and abrades her painted canvases, giving them a veneer of age, use, even abuse. Like vandalized walls, several canvases appear scratched, sullied and carelessly patched, the new coat a glaring white next to the worn ivory of the rest. Carnwath musters this rawness and toughness, however, only to confirm the necessity of spiritual refuge.

In “Home Safe,” she floats a small silhouette of a house on just such a bruised wall of paint. Above it hovers a red target, and further up, a forbidden zone marked by yellow and black stripes. The blocky black house stands as a refuge amid the aggression of the surrounding symbols. Across its solid surface, Carnwath inscribes with urgency, “Where is it safe anymore today in our world.” The outline of a nude woman’s midsection, a chair and a bed also surround the house, underscoring a sense of physical vulnerability.

Carnwath’s is an art of associations. Rarely does she spell out her intent as clearly as in “Home Safe.” More often, the symbols and words in her work resonate with each other in more open-ended ways; they act as catalysts for reflection on the entirety of the human enterprise.

L-i-f-e, spelled out across the paired canvases of “Homework,” again draws our attention to the grand scheme of things. Here, Carnwath aligns mundane and vital signs in three horizontal rows. A pair of socks and a T-shirt appear, but so do more profound symbols of origin: male and female genitals, the spiral, the funnel. Emerging from the base of the letter F, are the words “acceptance,” “generosity,” “hope,” “love,” “forgiveness,” and others, composing a list of fundamental human virtues.

Carnwath refers to this painting in another work in the show (the installation, “Words and Pictures: Studio Wall”), giving it the longer and more telling title, “Homework for a Planet.” These are the keys to our survival, Carnwath seems to say. These qualities and signs are as vital to our past as to our future.

The painting, “Animals,” also bears a prescriptive message: “The animals they are mute they are our link to our instinct.” These words are written in black from edge to edge, top to bottom of the canvas. Underneath lies an image of a tree, in gray outline, sporting only a few leaves. A perfect red apple hangs from one of its branches, however, and the words “life” and “breath” are inscribed on its trunk, thereby linking it with the tree of biblical legend. On that tree slithered a serpent that, according to the tale, taught us our true nature, or as Carnwath states, connected us with our instinct. Animals may be mute to our ears, but their messages continue to reach us.

Carnwath’s allusion to the Bible and her recurring use of crosses--usually along the bottom edge of a painting, in the manner of grave markers--lends her work a strong religious, or spiritual undercurrent. The relationship between matter and spirit also finds its way into the show’s title, “Nature’s Alchemy.” The practice of alchemy, traced back as far as ancient Egypt but more commonly associated with the Middle Ages, involved the chemical transmutation of base metals into gold.

If nature is an alchemist, making precious that which seems mundane, then so, too, is the artist, like Carnwath, who reveals the childlike to be wise and who whispers poems of ecstasy and healing across a paint-encrusted canvas.