This Painter Finally Puts Her Foot Down : Known for her whimsical paintings, Elizabeth Murray has taken on the art of sculpture--with a 12-foot-high red shoe.

When Elizabeth Murray presented her first sketches for the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture at UC San Diego, she envisioned a larger, outdoor version of her indoor work, a painting that would climb a wall. “My paintings,” she says, “are all about being on the wall and coming off the wall, the tension between the painting and the wall.” But another idea finally stuck, becoming the noted New York-based artist’s first free-standing sculpture.

True to the restless, uncontainable energy that animates her paintings, “Red Shoe” stands on the ground, but it is all about coming off the ground. Twelve feet tall and built of painted cedar, it looks as if it tripped its way to its site in a eucalyptus grove on the edge of campus. If its meandering, pretzel-twisted yellow shoelace wasn’t the culprit that sent it reeling and bouncing to this spot, then perhaps it was the painted wood “rock” wedged under its heel.

Today, “Red Shoe” will be officially dedicated as the 13th work in the Stuart Collection, a remarkable ensemble of site-specific commissioned sculptures, slices of surprise and provocation spread throughout the campus.

Those using the narrow asphalt path at UC San Diego’s Revelle Entrance will suddenly find themselves on a collision course with Murray’s big red shoe.

If they’ve spent any time at the university, they probably have already been ensnared and enchanted by other works in the collection, like Terry Allen’s lead-covered trees that issue a sporadic stream of recorded music and poetry or Alexis Smith’s 560-foot-long tile “Snake Path,” with its lush, Edenic garden and oversized granite edition of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The blinking neon of Bruce Nauman’s “Vices and Virtues,” the provocative truisms incised in Jenny Holzer’s green granite table and the sardonic humor in William Wegman’s urban scenic overlook lay the foundation for this kooky confrontation with an oversized shoe.

It was the “zany and joyful” way the collection has been conceived that made Murray interested in joining it.

“When I came here and saw the collection [in 1994], I really loved it,” she says. “It intrigued me that so many people who one didn’t think of as sculptors had pieces, and all of the pieces felt so specific and yet very offhand in a charming and special way.”

In town a few weeks ago for a whirlwind visit to install her sculpture, Murray, 55, seemed to match her work’s reputation for being in perpetual motion. But once the angle of the shoe was determined and the faux rocks were in place, she became surprisingly relaxed. Her pale blue eyes smiled, her thick wedge of gray curls stayed put. There was an hour of daylight left to spare.

Mary Livingstone Beebe, the Stuart Collection’s director since its founding in 1982, has made expecting the unexpected--especially in the choice of artists--one of the guiding principles of the collection. And the strategy builds on its own momentum: “Part of the willingness for the artist to take these kinds of risks,” she says, “is they like the company.”

New challenges faced Murray in making the sculpture. The lag time from start to finish, and the lack of immediate contact with the work while her assistant, Warren Kloner, fabricated it, were especially frustrating, she says. But for all the differences in execution, “Red Shoe” feels much like a logical extension of her constructed, shaped canvas paintings, which have been widely lauded for their robust physicality, psychological intensity and fusion of painterly and sculptural qualities. One critic described her work as “a kind of pictorial yoga.”

Is “Red Shoe” continuous with her painted work or is it a real departure?

“That question is what feels like the core, intriguing thing for me, personally, in terms of doing it,” she says. “What’s a sculpture and what’s a painting?

“It [the shoe] feels like my work in how it’s been processed through me, but doing it, I understand much more clearly the difference between my painting and sculpture. I realize that what I make are, to me, very much paintings, even though they’re very physical and they have sculptural elements. It’s very different to walk around something and think about it in space.”

Murray remembers chiding her colleagues in art school--first at the Art Institute of Chicago, then Mills College--for fighting among themselves about categorizations, with figurative painters pitted against abstractionists.

“All those divisions and issues are so silly, and they’ve always felt silly to me,” she says. Yet in the course of discussion, Murray’s resolve takes some of the same loopy turns as the shapes in her paintings, and distinctions between one style and another, one medium and another, begin to slide away.

“A sculpture is a sculpture,” she starts. “It exists in space in a certain way, and a painting is a painting. But . . . ,” she trails off, laughing at finding herself once again in the gray area “ . . . I think the experience is very much the same, really.”

Critical dialogue about Murray’s work proliferates, but early viewers of “Red Shoe” had only one basic question: What is it?

Without knowing its title, one of the workmen installing the piece assumed it was a duck. The shoe’s heel looks much like a chimney, and from a distance, the silhouette in the trees could pass for a giant, lumpy telephone or a blob of red paint extruded from a tube.

“It definitely looks like a recognizable object,” Beebe says. “It’s familiar, this bulging, arching thing lurching through the woods. You have the same sense as in her paintings of slight pandemonium, of trying to figure out what’s going on, and reason doesn’t work.”

Though a single abandoned shoe suggests something amiss, the narrative possibilities opened up by the sculpture are generally benign and fanciful. The shoe’s gigantic scale, bright color and distorted shape bring to mind the fantastic world of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, the stories of the old woman who lived in a shoe and Jack and the Beanstalk. Shoes are commonplace but personal, Murray says, and like the tables, coffee cups, spoons and chairs that recur in her paintings, they prompt a wealth of associations.

Sometimes brooding, sometimes celebratory, Murray’s paintings revel in the richness and depth of emotional and physical life. For more than 15 years, critics have heaped praise on her for reinvigorating painting, restoring its visual vitality after the dry season of minimalism and offering accessible content and narrative possibility in lieu of conceptual art’s heady mind games.

Murray’s maximalist approach, borrowing across time from artists as diverse as Juan Gris, Paul Cezanne, Willem de Kooning, Claes Oldenburg and others, has earned her broad popular appeal. A traveling survey of her paintings (which came to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1987) was well received, and attention to her work has been consistent. Last month, Murray, who lives in New York with her husband, poet Bob Holman, and their two daughters, was added to the stable of the prestigious bicoastal PaceWildenstein Gallery.

Still, there is room for vulnerability, especially in her newest venture. “Red Shoe,” like much of her work, owes a lot to the exaggerated language of cartoons, and Murray says she feared that the sculpture might be summarily dismissed as just funny.

“There were periods of time when I really hated the piece and thought this is really going to look ridiculous out there. It’s too silly, too cartoony. I mean, one of my favorite sculptors is Richard Serra. If I were to compare this little red shoe to the kind of tensions and boldness of his work, which is scary and very powerful, this is nothing like that at all.

“But now, to see it out here where it belongs, it’s just great. I have no idea if it’s good, bad, stupid, silly or brilliant, whatever. It’s just really fun to see it where I conceived of it. It’s very satisfying.”

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“RED SHOE,” UC San Diego, near the intersection of North Torrey Pines Road and Revelle College Drive, near the Mandell Weiss Theatre. Events: Elizabeth Murray will give a slide presentation at 3 p.m. today in Room 1402, Galbraith Hall, UC San Diego. A reception follows from 4 to 6 p.m. at the site of the sculpture. Information: Stuart Collection, (619) 534-2117.