Unique Portraits Steeped in Mixed Messages of Mass Media Fascination

Internationally recognized Chicago artist Ed Paschke has painted unique visions of diverse American cultural icons for more than 25 years. His subjects have ranged from Chicago strippers, pimps and prostitutes to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis; from Lee Harvey Oswald to Abraham Lincoln.

Often though, his electrified, mask-like portraits, which resonate from bold lines and colors of the highest key, depict anonymous, but not uninteresting people steeped in mixed messages. Appearing similar to electronically generated video or computer screen images, Paschke’s paintings reflect his fascination with the omnipresent mass media, and his concern with its effect on our ability to experience anything directly anymore.

“He’s an ongoing chronicler of certain aspects of our culture,” said Dorothy Goldeen of Dorothy Goldeen Gallery in Santa Monica, which is exhibiting a series of 10 new paintings by Paschke. She began showing his work in San Francisco in 1984. “I saw then that he was bringing something very unusual to painting, a media base. He’s the last stop before you get into video.”

Yet, it was not electronic media that directly prompted his vibrant new paintings of mostly female faces that coerce viewers to focus on facial parts: those lips, those eyes, sometimes a nose or an ear. Rather, Paschke said he was motivated by the current predilection among Los Angeles inhabitants to permanently alter the features of their faces.

“In primitive cultures, people transformed themselves with face painting and masks, but that was temporary. To physically alter yourself with a nose job, eye job or chin implant, that’s permanent. That’s a significant commitment,” Paschke said. “It’s such an L.A. idea. Knowing I was going to have a show in L.A. inspired me.”

Paschke derived the facial images in the paintings from pictures he found in 1940s fashion magazines. Isolating those pictures, he drew on top of them--”editorializing,” he said--and then put them under a projector to see what they looked like.

He built the painted images with black paint on white canvases, adding color on top as if he were colorizing black-and-white images. One is at once put off and drawn into these creatures of hollow beauty.

In four portraits that represent the cycle of the seasons--and possibly the fashion world’s dictum that we change with them--Paschke highlights not only facial parts, but also the hands of the woman applying makeup. In “Glace” (Winter), the dominant color is blue, down to the nail polish. In “Salad” (Spring), the prevalent colors are green and blue, in “Vino” (Summer), reddish purple, orange and yellow, in “Coffee” (Autumn), brownish gold.

“The picture plane of these paintings represents our relationship with our mirror,” Paschke said, adding that humankind’s confrontation with that object has been ongoing throughout the ages and is eternal.

In creating not only these four paintings, but the whole series, Paschke wrestled with certain issues and ideas about the presentation of self including, he said, “makeup as religion, the transcendence of the self into another realm.” Several of the paintings contain tattoo-like images, and symbols from alchemy, the medieval chemical science that aimed to transform something common into something special.

“People have more control over their own destinies in this age of available technology that was not available before,” he said. “Yet, with options there, people choose to further the evolution of standardization. In this informational society, with the world wired together, things are moving toward more standardization. That’s not a good thing.”

“Ed Paschke, New Paintings” at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St . , Santa Monica, through May 23. Open 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Call (310) 395-0222.

ART PHOTOGRAPHS: Photographer Rose Shoshana opened the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in December because she wanted to bring the work of fine art and documentary photographers out from their portfolios and into a public gallery setting.

“There’s been little work shown in L.A. that’s not celebrity oriented,” she said. “The photographer has to be a celebrity. We’re inundated with that. There is so much good work out there that is not being seen. We’re making it more accessible.”

The gallery’s current group show presents the work of seven accomplished photographers who originate from almost as many points around the globe.

Macduff Everton’s panoramic color landscapes capture the beauty of the Ponte Vechio in Florence, Italy, and Kirkby Pool in England, among other places, without prettifying them or turning them into standard postcard images. “They’re not just pretty pictures. There is a haunting, deeper quality to his work,” Shoshana said of the Santa Barbara photographer.

Born in Tokyo, Hideoki Hagiwara now divides his time between Tokyo and New York. His black-and-white series of landscape photographs in this exhibit were taken on the northern island of Hokkaido, Japan, in the winter of 1979. They capture the light and dark contrasts of an island winter. In one photograph, ocean water shimmers in the sunlight behind snow covered trees.

Wolfgang Volz of Dusseldorf, Germany, is primarily known for his 20-year collaboration with the artist, Christo. Volz photographed several of Christo’s projects including “The Umbrellas” in the Tejon Pass last year, “Pont Neuf Wrapped” in Paris, and “Running Fence” in Northern California. In this show is a series of black-and-white photographs he took in East Germany soon after the Berlin Wall came down. Although he had photographed all over the world, before that trip he had never been to the former German Democratic Republic.

Antonin Kratochvil’s black-and-white photographs document sideshows at carnivals and midways during the late 1970s in Florida and North Carolina. The Czech-born photographer’s images of sword swallowers and snake handlers, acrobats and assorted freaks are at once humorous, empathetic and respectful of the performers.

Max Aguilera-Hellweg took his 4-by-5 camera and Polaroid black-and-white film to U.S.-Mexican border towns, Mexico City, Lima, Peru and East Los Angeles. He set up his camera in the streets and took pictures of the people in these places sin sonrisa (without a smile), meaning without the smiles Aguilera-Hellweg says we North Americans use to hide our real selves. He gave his subjects the print, and kept the Polaroid negative, from which he’s made the engaging, fine prints of the taxicab drivers, ice cream vendors, children and others that are in the show.

Steve Nilsson’s melancholy, pictorial-style photographs of trees, a waterfall and a winding road are reminiscent of landscape photographs taken during the previous century. However, Nilsson’s pictures were shot with a toy camera that was originally given away free at gas stations in the early 1970s to anyone who filled up the tank.

German photographer Ursula Schultz Dornburg spent time in what was once called Mesopotamia in 1980, photographing the barren landscapes and ruins of this planet’s oldest civilization. Nothing had changed since the time of Babylon. Yet, due to recent disclosures about Iraqi military activity, she has come to learn that just beyond the horizon of one of her deserted landscape photographs was one of Saddam Hussein’s secret military bunkers.

“Group Show” at Gallery of Contemporary Photography, 2431-B Main St., Santa Monica, through May 24. Open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m.to 6 p.m. Sunday. Call (310) 399-4282.

WOMEN PAINTERS: The DeVille Galleries, which specializes in 19th- and 20th-Century American Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work, is spotlighting the work of 18 women painters. Paintings date from the mid-1800s to present day.

Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933)--a Boston painter who met Claude Monet in 1889, became his friend and a neighbor in Giverny, and painted with him there--is represented in this show with five paintings, including portraits and landscapes.

The circa-1904 charcoal drawing by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), “ L’Enfant An Beret ,” has a drawing by her on the other side of it as well. The subject matter is similar to her oil painting, “Little Girl in a Red Beret” (1898).

Most unusual here are the paintings by Hazel Finck (1894-1977) and Aurelia Caloenesco (1886-1960), which contain surreal and realist qualities. This is especially true of Caloenesco’s oil on canvas, “Study/World War I Mural,” which depicts small images of soldiers, a battleship, an airplane and heavy machinery. Dominating the canvas, presiding over the whole shebang, is a strong, agile figure that appears to be a woman, waving an unidentifiable flag.