Coming to Terms With Mom : Georganne Deen’s work is a nakedly personal inquiry into her demons and obsessions.

‘Art is how I navigate depression,” says artist Georganne Deen, whose series of paintings exploring her relationship with her mother, “The Mother Load,” is on view at the Christopher Grimes Gallery through Jan. 7. “Making art enables me to work through it, and with these paintings I neutralized things that had been infuriating me for years. This isn’t to say I was finally able to love my mother when I finished the series--I did, however, feel a sense of relief.

“I know lots of people who have similar relationships with their mothers,” adds Deen. “Maybe I gravitate toward them, but it’s also possible that the problems these paintings examine aren’t unusual.” Deen’s problematic relationship with her mother may not be unusual, but many other things about her are. The Los Feliz house she shares with her husband of five years, archeologist John Pohl, is a veritable museum of outsider and folk art, kitsch, funk and psychedelia. And Deen herself is a physically fragile, birdlike creature with the iron will of a locomotive. She speaks with a Texas drawl that might make you dismiss her as a hayseed if you didn’t know better; in fact, she’s been an underground art star for 15 years, and, along with Sue Williams and Sue Coe, is one of the few women artists to be regularly included in shows exploring art rooted in low culture rather than academia. Like Gary Panter, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, Deen blurs the boundaries that separate cartoons, fine art painting and advertising. And as is usually the case with work of that ilk, her art is a nakedly personal inquiry into her own demons and obsessions.

Currently included in “New Pop,” a show of work by 15 American artists at the Fortuny Museum in Venice, Italy, Deen can be seen next month at Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery in an exhibition exploring cartoons that burst the bounds of that form. She’s also at work on a segment for “Bad Day on the Midway,” the second interactive CD-ROM by San Francisco cult band the Residents, and recently completed a cover for “Go Naked,” an underground comic edited by Gary Panter.

“I was raised by a single alcoholic parent and was a miserable child,” says Deen, who was born in Ft. Worth in 1951, one of two girls in a family of four children. “My parents divorced when I was 6, and once my dad left my worst nightmares about my mother came true--she pulled out every stop and let it all hang out.

“My mother was interested in art, and she made things, but her taste was very middle class--she made a mosaic of a guy holding bongo drums, for instance,” says Deen of her early influences. “We did have art books in the house though, and as a teen-ager I loved psychedelic art, British Pop and German Expressionism.”

At the age of 17, Deen was hit by the first of three serious depressions that were to shape her life. “I went to a therapist who put me on drugs, but that didn’t help--in fact, nothing seemed to help, and I didn’t know how to get out of this state, or if I’d even live through it. I couldn’t draw or do much of anything, and I just lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, and completely withdrew from the world.”

I n 1970 Deen began to emerge from her depression, then in 1972 she had what she describes as “my first real art experience. That was when I met Gary Panter--when I saw his work, I knew I’d seen something different.” The following year, at Panter’s encouragement, Deen enrolled at East Texas State where he was also a student, and began to find her own voice as an artist.

“I stopped doing what my teachers told me to do and started having fun with art,” she recalls. “At the time I was looking at a lot of Outsider art and work by the Hairy Who, but one of my biggest influences then, and now, was advertising art--I love pictures and words in clever combinations.”

Deen has done advertisements, but ultimately the style she began developing at East Texas State matured into something with far too much edge to function as a sales tool. Combining elements of Surrealism with the fragmented composition typical of much post-modern art, her work has a hallucinatory undercurrent of dread evocative of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya; like those artists, Deen is essentially creating visual morality tales.

Deen’s second depression hit in 1974 when her younger brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. “When my brother died the family went into a tailspin--my mother started drinking again and I crashed for the second time. My solution was to move to New York. I moved there planning to be an artist, but there wasn’t any art around that resembled what I was doing, so I wound up working as an illustrator. I was making a decent living, but by 1978 the depression I’d been fighting off since 1974 took over and I stopped being able to work.

“After two terrible years, I moved to L.A., in 1980,” she continues. “I was still depressed but I wasn’t in the depths of it, and artistically things began to improve. I stopped free-lancing and enrolled at CalArts, but the teachers there kept trying to mold me into something I wasn’t, so I quit after one semester.”

Leaving CalArts, Deen started trying to get any work she could; she had a hard time finding work, was paid next to nothing for the work she got, and much of what she did was rejected by the people who hired her. Those factors conspired to liberate her once and for all from commercial art.

“I finally started making art just for myself, and the focus of the work shifted from outside issues onto what was going on inside of me,” she recalls. “At the time, underground galleries like the Zero Zero were starting to open in L.A., and I showed at the Zero a lot during those years. I also started doing illustration work again, which I finally started to enjoy because people stopped asking me to do things that weren’t me,” she adds.

Coming on the heels of this shift in direction, Deen married in 1989 and moved to Washington for a year, where her husband was awarded a research grant.

“When we were in Washington, I started descending into my third depression, and as always I didn’t have a clue how to cope with it,” she says. “The one thing I knew was that the sound of my mother’s voice threw me into a complete rage, so I decided I wasn’t going to have anything to do with her. I knew I had to do something more to resolve the feelings I had about her though, so I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what she’d said and done that was creating such problems for me.

“The conclusions I came to probably sound really trite,” she says. “For instance, she never told me anything about her own life, and never gave me anything you could consider good advice on how to deal with problems. She was extremely critical, and never taught me how to deal with conflict. She had distorted ideas about love, and told me that sex was bad and dirty. She taught me that to be beautiful you had to get a perm, tweeze your eyebrows--you had to subject yourself to pain to be beautiful. The idea of a beauty that comes from within never occurred to her.

“When I realized all this, the ugly drawings I was making at the time started making sense to me,” she continues. “I didn’t like the images I was creating, but I kept plugging away, and eventually realized I was making art about my mother.

“I didn’t plan it this way, but the series begins with a birth painting and concludes with a puberty-age painting. The last painting, ‘Mary’s Lane,’ was the hardest to do because it forced me to deal with something incredibly painful--the point where I turned against myself.

“I’d die if (my mother) saw these paintings because she’s a pretty sad case, and I’m not trying to do anything to her,” says Deen of the eight-painting series, which she completed last year. “I made these paintings for me, and have come to think of them as instructive paintings that should hang in the home as a reminder to behave oneself, especially if you have children.

“This is the most fully realized body of work I’ve done, but it’s also been the hardest,” she concludes. “I’ve said that the paintings enabled me to deal with my depression, but truthfully, I don’t know how I survived it. I’ve been trying to figure that out--in fact, I think that will be the subject of my next series. What prevented me from going all the way? For all I know it might’ve been my mother.”*

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373. Ends Jan. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.