Maine’s gain

George Lloyd shows he’s found a home here

By Jenna Russell

“George Lloyd Paintings: The Maine Years,” shows at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art through August 24. Call (207) 646-4909.

SENSUAL AND ENIGMATIC: Lloyd’s work is exuberant and lush.

Sit and watch ocean waves breaking over rocks, and you accept, because you have to, that the movement of the water will not be predictable. It cascades through gaps, collides with itself and feathers back. Like the parent of a willful adolescent, all you can do is lean back and let it. George Lloyd’s paintings should be studied the same way, with acceptance that the waterfalls of color won’t still their splashing for anyone.

Lloyd has lived in Portland since 1984, and the current show at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, “George Lloyd Paintings: The Maine Years,” celebrates his last two decades with more than 50 paintings loaned by collectors, galleries, and the artist himself. In the barn-style gallery where most of them are hung, the visual riches border on sensory overload. Dazzled into paralysis, it’s hard to know where to hover. Chronology is disregarded, so it’s tough to trace artistic development. There’s limited white space between works, and the impact of one painting, like ripples on a pond, fans out to overlap with the presence of the next one. It’s like sampling a series of wines in quick succession without clearing the palate. (Not “proper” procedure, perhaps, but pleasingly instinctive.)

The work is unmistakably contemporary, with Rothko-esque sensitivity to color and an obvious tendency to abstraction. Lloyd’s connection to Matisse is strongly felt, however, and titles like “Blue Interior,” “Red Gateway,” and “Interior with Striding Figure” are firmly grounded in landscape and figure. Does it matter that Lloyd, a Massachusetts native schooled at Yale and the Rhode Island School of Design, spent the 1970s in California? It would seem to, if one believes that climate influences palette, and that the baby’s-room lemons and melons of early-’80s work like “Twisted Construct” reflect the sunlit memories he brought to Maine with him. The recent work incorporates and builds on darkness; in “Wrecked Auto” (2000), pale spearmint and foggy ochre only emphasize the dominant black and brown.

Yes, says Lloyd, his adopted home is an influence, though he’s had more shows in California than Maine since moving here. “There are no lighthouses or lobsters, but they look like Maine,” he said of the paintings in Ogunquit. “Even the size of them, their economy of scale.” Most are no larger than two feet across, an intimacy the artist attributes in part to the smallness of the rooms he lives in. He says the pictures are all improvisations, shaped in part by his present environment and partly by longed-for destinations.

“I’m a Romantic, and Romantics want to be in another place,” says Lloyd, who considers himself isolated from the local arts community. “It’s the dream of travel, that exoticism.”

Simple postcards these are not. “Prismatic View” (1983) offers a childish house icon, a square topped with a triangle. But chunks of orange meteor are piled high on the roof, and everywhere light and air are divided into corridors and slots like hidden mail drops. The atmospheric channels fit imperfectly together but seem loaded with potential, like the makings of a bomb packed in a square truck compartment. “Blue Reverie” (2000) has soothing segments, plush, nougaty pockets to rest in, but Lloyd never rests for long, and even the softest compositions froth and ignite at the edges. The stimulation is constant, and it can generate anxiety, as the viewer confronts constant choices.

The eye darts from one focus to another, from the sleek plume of layered, uncontained color that’s the left-hand half of “Ghost” (1999) to the controlled black-and-white checkerboard on the right. Each painting offers dead ends and beguiling crevices, doors and windows to step through, and the architecture is a kind of acceleration. The looking picks up velocity, coasts up and out of the lush stasis of color.

The exuberance of options: this is Lloyd’s joyride, but it’s not a trip that blows through all red lights and stop signs. Even in “La Fantasma” (1998), where a strange orange cloud reverberates and shivers, ghostly inexplicable, there’s an axis etched precisely near the center, its right angles an almost invisible nod to scientific order. The painting can be both precise and ecstatic. This combination makes wild comparisons possible. It’s not that far-fetched to say Lloyd’s 30-by-24 inch “Moroccan Construct” (1994) shares sensibility with a wall-spanning Titian Assumption in a Venice church. Both have a vertical construction, a light at the center in contrast with crimson and umber, and an elegance of gesture that checks excess emotion.

Lloyd says his paintings are enigmatic and sensual. “You have to feel them at the gut level,” he says. “They have that potential.” He knows it better than anyone. His recent paintings are as close as pictures get to poems. They’re accumulations of details, instants carefully recorded, that conjure an intensity beyond their own obvious import. Well told, the poem makes unfamiliar territory our own. With his romantic appetite for unmapped roads, Lloyd is among the best painters working in the state. California’s loss is cause for Maine’s celebration.

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