The cosmic eye

Paul Plante zooms in on birds

By Jenna Russell

“Eye to Eye with Paul Plante” shows through Feb. 17 at the O’Farrell Gallery in Brunswick. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mon. through Sat.

“Northern Cardinal”: for an apparently simple subject, the bird’s eye is positively rife with symbol.

Imagine a movie screen showing peaceful, floating planet Earth. The camera starts to zoom forward, ever closer, so one continent fills the screen, then one nation, state, and so on, down to a single city, street, backyard. The camera picks a tree, a branch, and a bird, and settles on the bird’s black eye, just the eye, glistening and darting. This is the intense, close-up focus of Paul Plante’s pastels.

There are no planets or continents in Plante’s small, square works, on display at the O’Farrell Gallery in Brunswick, though a couple could be satellite photos of tar-filled craters on Neptune. These are the eyes of birds, specific ones, widgeons and red-winged blackbirds, and while they are factually accurate, detailed studies, they don’t have a literal, Audubon look about them. The rest of the universe seems consciously cropped out of every one. Mystery and wonder remain, in high concentrations.

It should be noted that any interpretation is colored by the knowledge that Plante, the artist, is a Catholic priest as well. This is a show-stopping biographical tidbit, thrilling and hard to ignore, and it generates high expectations. We want our artists to know something we don’t, and to show us things we can’t see for ourselves. The man of God, well-connected in unseeable circles, is perfect for the job.

The leader of St. John the Baptist Church in Winslow, Plante makes about 1000 drawings each year, and shows them in galleries from Boston and Bar Harbor to Biloxi and Santa Monica. A graduate of theology school who went back to art school in Portland 20 years later, he also does portraits of fruit, treating apples with the same reverence as his birds. Every one is different, but they are, as a body, astoundingly consistent. The bird’s eye is usually an inky-black pool, sometimes ringed with yellow-green or gray or orange, sometimes centered in unusual facial markings, typically animated by a tiny white reflection. The whole world, the light and commotion of man, concentrated in a single bright pinprick and reflected back on the dark infinity of nature.

Plante’s colors are saturated and rich. A green-gold eye, in “Brown Pelican,” is ringed with black and framed by designs in downy red and purple. And in “Northern Cardinal,” a three-by-three arrangement of nine different pastels, the reds are brilliant, bayberry, blood shades. Each cardinal eye in the grid has different rings — green, blue-gray, amber — like bubbles catching the sun at different angles. The consistency of nature, examined up close, reveals infinite variation, like that of snowflakes under the magnifying lens.

For all their color, the pastels are essentially spare. They strip the creatures even of the wings that usually define them. The bird’s eye, a microscopic flicker in a gigantic, complicated world — the eye of the needle in the haystack — is all the artist needs. Like the jar on the Tennessee hill in the Wallace Stevens poem, the round eye makes the wilderness surround it. Plante’s works are the aesthetic equivalent of the monk’s room, furnished with the essential chair and bed and nothing else. It’s easy to imagine him making them as a kind of working meditation, a way of staying focused in the moment of creation. The specific dates on the pieces — “March 3, 1999” — seem to bolster this theory. The literal reflection in the bird’s eye might be a metaphor for internal reflection.

For an apparently simple subject, the bird’s eye is positively rife with symbol. The bird is often a religious symbol for peace, the phoenix represents new beginnings, and the eye can be shorthand for knowledge. Most of these eyes are perfect circles within circles — a mystical shape that speaks of unity and eternity, with ceremony and epiphany at its center. It’s a good thing the works are grounded in the visual specifics of real bird varieties; that faithfulness of observation keeps the symbols from swallowing the whole experiment. But Plante resists convention that would make it easier to take the eyes at face value. They are always singles, hung alone or in large sets of multiples, never in predictable pairs, unless as a jarring, mismatched couple, as in “American Widgeon.”

Strangely, despite all the eyes staring, there is no feeling of being watched in the small, rectangular space where the Plante show is hidden behind O’Farrell’s front room. It’s rather a feeling of watching someone watching something else — the birds’ gaze seems internal, the veiled stare of a being lost in thought, or else it’s directed over our shoulder at some much more absorbing presence. The mood they create is not like that of any real birds in your garden. These are calm, still and centered, not timid or startled.

We know the bird is not “intelligent” by any human standard, which makes it hard to explain the weight of contemplation in pieces like “Barn Owl.” It may be suggested by his dual callings, priest and artist, but we’re left with the conviction that Plante, by zooming in and celebrating, with unwavering attention, the boundless perfection of this one tiny spark in the wilderness, has shown us something he believes in. He asks our faith in the rest, the vastness implied but not shown. n

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.