Artist Nancy Kittredge Takes a Page From the Fauvist Legacy

In the early years of this century, painters Henri Matisse and Maurice De Vlaminck launched a style that became known as Fauvism for its wild, autonomous color. The two artists also played the violin together, but at a certain point in their musical relationship, Matisse bowed out. Vlaminck, it seemed, insisted on playing fortissimo all of the time.

This snippet of art history brings much to bear on the current show of Nancy Kittredge’s work at the David Zapf Gallery (2400 Kettner Blvd.), through Oct. 13.

Not only does Kittredge’s use of hot, vivid color owe much to the Fauvist legacy, but, like Vlaminck’s playing, Kittredge’s painting shrieks with a high intensity that never lets up. Searing reds and shocking greens smother nearly every canvas, piling on the tension but offering no relief.

Christian themes such as the fall of man and the offering of Communion appear, as do such religious symbols as crosses and fish. Many of the paintings and pastel drawings in the show can also be read in more universal terms, as images of individuals on personal journeys of enlightenment. Yet the passionate physicality of Kittredge’s palette seems to be at odds with the cool spirituality of her images.

In “Uncharted Course,” two women in a boat float down a grass-lined canal, quiet and contemplative. In “The Blue Triangle,” a pair of silhouetted figures stand in awe at a vision of the geometric form hovering in a luminous cloud. In her notes to the show, Kittredge points out that the blue triangle represents the Holy Trinity.

Whether gazing at symbols in the sky or at each other, the figures in Kittredge’s paintings are always statuesque and stoic, their expressions absently fixed in the middle distance. “I accept the fact that we live on two different spheres and that we are going on to something different and have been somewhere else,” Kittredge is quoted as saying in the 1988 book, “San Diego Artists.” Indeed, her characters do seem to exist in an amorphous space between realms, pondering the spiritual threshold before them.

Too often, however, this quiet narrative is clothed in an ill-fitting costume of scorching color. While the Fauves used strong color to give their paintings a rawness and immediacy, Kittredge seems to use her intense palette more out of habit than anything else, and the work suffers from a cloying sameness as a result.

ART NOTES . . .

The artists who have been designing posters for the Royal Chicano Air Force have one foot in the old, spiritually-charged world of pre-Colombian pyramids and the other in the brash present. In their work, symbols of Aztec and Mayan gods mingle with proclamations of political power, calls for boycotts and announcements of community events.

A spirited collection of posters by the RCAF can be seen through October 14 at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. The group, founded in Sacramento in 1968 by three artists, was intended “as a political action organizing body to express personal visions of Chicano rights through the magic of art.”

This retrospective look at the RCAF’s efforts, from the collection of co-founder Ricardo Favela, reaches from the mundane to the militant. Benign posters announcing concerts hang next to sterner statements of solidarity with the United Farm Workers. The show resonates with nostalgia, though the roots and reasons for the movement remain very much alive.

DeLoss McGraw, whose wry, whimsical works have both inspired and been inspired by poetry, has completed a new book. “Janet and DeLoss: Poems and Pictures” pairs five new poems and four translations from the Japanese by San Franciscan Janet Lewis with woodcuts by the San Diego-based artist. The book was published in an edition of 90 by Brighton Press, the local printmaking atelier that has published four other books illustrated by McGraw.

San Diego artists on the move: Sculptor Anne Mudge and installation artist Mario Lara are included in the four-person show, “Ancient Stillness/Ancient Silence,” at the Biota Gallery in West Hollywood, through October 13. The show was organized by Katya Williamson, formerly curator of public art for the Carlsbad Arts Office. . . . Joyce Cutler-Shaw is currently featured in an exhibition at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, The Netherlands. The show, titled “In Flight/Op Wieken,” continues through November 24.