ART : Analytical, Sometimes Quirky View of World

In the Bay Area, artist Jay DeFeo--who died last year--used to be famous for a work few people had ever seen. “The Rose,” which she worked on for seven years in the ‘50s, is a delicately surfaced, 12-foot-high, 2,300-pound behemoth that started out as a monochrome painting and wound up as a hybrid sculpture. After covering the surface with layer after layer of brushwork--bulking up as much as eight inches--DeFeo began embedding beads and other doodads in the piece, and carving the encrustations of paint.

Well, “The Rose” isn’t included in “Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper”--an exhibit of 38 years of her work at Laguna Art Museum through Oct. 7--because it emphatically is not a work on paper, and in any case has been in storage since 1972 after an uncompleted attempt at restoration. But the impetus behind this epic piece is strongly related to DeFeo’s smaller-scale work, and in fact, a few of the drawings are on a grand scale.

Often using everyday objects as a starting point, DeFeo focused on relationships of forms to create work with an abstract feel and an insistent undercurrent of perceptual and psychological disquiet.

Most of these not-quite-paintings, not-quite-drawings look like images of real-life objects in the process of disappearing, or changing into another form. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure out just what the original object was--either because it has become so blurred and fragmentary, or because the angle DeFeo chose was so unusual. (Drawings of a camera tripod, a tape dispenser and a shoe tree are examples of this kind of mysterious evasion.)

DeFeo often reworked a single piece for months--a methodical approach more often associated with painting than drawing--and frequently applied several media (primarily acrylic, pastel, charcoal and wax pencil) in sequences of layers to achieve the occluded effects she had in mind.

“The Eyes,” a large and uncharacteristically clear-cut image, is nonetheless intrinsically related to her more obscure pieces. It is about the process of seeing, the essential subject of DeFeo’s transmutations of form. The pale glow emanating from the giant eyes (based on DeFeo’s own) suggests the focused concentration of a larger-than-life Seer--or an artist who quietly claims such powers.

Clusters of fine, vertical lines read as reflections from a curtain positioned between the Seer and the viewer and rendered transparent by the intensity of the Seer’s gaze. Other lines form a three-dimensional scaffolding, a fantasy architecture. And still other uncountable networks of fine lines represent individual strands of hair, eyebrow growth and separate lashes. The accretion of patient detail suggests a near-obsessive fascination with getting down on paper a magnified and hyperintense image of reality.

Jay was a high school nickname for Mary Joan that proved a usefully gender-free tag in the overwhelmingly male world of art. (Even at UC Berkeley, where she was an undergraduate, there was only one female instructor in the art department.)

She came on the scene as a painter during the golden years of the ‘50s and ‘60s when the young Funk artists, Beat poets and jazz musicians were cooking up cockeyed rhapsodies and living on a dime. For a time, she was married to Wally Hendrick, a leading Funk artist. But at a time of social protest and exuberant in-group activities, she was an independent visionary devoting herself to what she called “private” art.

The size of her work at any given moment had a lot to do with where she was living. Working in a large studio after her return from Europe, she made plaster sculptures; when the rent became prohibitive, she moved to a small apartment and began turning out jewelry and works on paper. All this work was small-scale. The jewelry, which she sold to a chichi dealer, was a means of support.

Acclaim came at 30, in 1959, when DeFeo was chosen as one of the “Sixteen Americans”--also including such soon-to-be-famous artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg--showcased at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet the traditional markers of success eluded her for many years.

In common with many female artists, privacy became the watchword of her life as well as of her art. She didn’t push to get her work shown, and her dealer at the time apparently wasn’t able to sell much. Happily, in the last decade of her life--cut short by cancer--a number of exhibitions reintroduced her to the public eye.

Organized by Sidra Stich, chief curator at the University Art Museum, UC Berkeley, this exhibit is a revelation. A superbly sensitive draftsman, DeFeo also was a strikingly analytical thinker. Like one of those people who love to take things apart just so they can put them together again, she seems to have been constantly teasing out the relationships of curved surfaces to knife-thin edges, solidity to transparency, objects to the marks they make (“Eraser”).

But there is a lot of passion, quirkiness and sensuality in this work, too. In “Untitled (For B.C.)”--for the artist Bruce Connor--DeFeo mates a golf bag and an upside-down pointed light bulb, surely a sexual metaphor. Flung-down blobs of thick white oil paint and long tracks of graphite applied with a heavy hand give “Death Wish” a fierceness for which its title alone can’t be responsible.

And what about “September Blackberries”--a little photograph of loose teeth gathered in a clam shell? Or “Blossom,” a collage in which photographs of what look like fraternity boys on the beach form the center of the flower, and luxurious female nudes form the petals? Or the immense “Doctor Jazz” with its guitar pegs, vague heart-shape, half-hidden eyes and strands of hair?

In her detailed catalogue essay, Brigid Doherty, a graduate student in the UC Berkeley history of art department, analyzes DeFeo’s art from the point of view of Conceptual Art. While many previous commentators have focused on DeFeo’s deft handling of media, Doherty adds an intellectual dimension by demonstrating out the artist’s self-conscious awareness of the way she perceived the world.

On the other hand, Doherty pays little attention to the ways DeFeo was a part of the Beat/Funk art climate. For example, it is incredible that the writer could discuss the drawing called “Apparition”--a curiously disturbing image of curling wisps of hair--without referring to its intensely sexual aura. DeFeo’s art was anything but rigidly theoretical. It was inclusive, rather than exclusive, and it remained “personal” and analytical while embracing the anarchic spirit in the air.

“Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper” continues through Oct. 7 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays (until 8 p.m. Fridays during July and August). Admission: $2 general, $1 students and seniors, free for children under 12. Information: (714) 494-6531.