A fresh face

Pondering new beginnings with Susan Tureen

By Jenna Russell

Susan Tureen shows at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery on High Street through October 21. Call (207) 772-1961.

“UNTITLED,”: oil on canvas, Susan Tureen.

It’s a time of year, and a time in history, when most of the talk is about endings. The end of summer, that familiar free-fall, has neatly coincided with the end of our illusions of safety, and the collapse of maybe the last surviving strain of innocence in America. At such a time, it’s good to remember that there are still beginnings; of small, vital things like the careers of fledgling artists. And that, as the nation noisily rearranges its world view, people like June Fitzpatrick are still quietly making sure that new talent is nourished.

Fitzpatrick first noticed Susan Tureen’s work when Tureen was part of a short-lived artists’ collective at 108 High Street, next-door to Fitzpatrick’s gallery. “It was always interesting, and then all of a sudden it was terrific,” says Fitzpatrick.

This month she gave Tureen her first-ever solo show, on view through October 20. A recent graduate of Maine College of Art who went back to school after her children were grown, Tureen is so new to the game, she doesn’t have an artist’s statement to shed light on what she’s up to. Nor do the medium-sized, abstract oil paintings have titles (they’re identified, in the show and here, by numbers only). So the viewer is on her own. The task — navigating a strange universe without a road map — is one we’ve all practiced this past month.

The paintings are square fields of intense, autumnal color intersected by bluntly-drawn vertical and horizontal lines. The crossed lines divide the picture plane into four smaller squares, and the instinctive reaction is to see them as windowpanes. Tureen favors fully-blown cerise and saffron and turquoise, and each hue is subtly layered, so the paintings have sky-like depth, and sometimes, Rothko-like atmosphere. We’re not really free to drift in the color, however; the axis of the window sash pulls us back to front and center.

This work hasn’t been seen before, but it doesn’t feel completely unfamiliar. Linear and organic elements play off each other as they do in the paintings of Dozier Bell, another Maine artist who shows with Fitzpatrick. Blue strips roughly connect pink and red rectangles in Tureen’s #9 painting, like an unraveling plaid; it calls to mind another Portland artist, Jen Gardiner, who uses repeated lines of thread to make chords of rippling, crashing color. There’s even a likeness to the photographs of Tanja Hollander, whose window views are dreamy blurs partly blocked by pieces of screens and curtains gone abstract in close-up.

Like many artists, Tureen’s foundations are simple, irresistibly frosty or humid color. She complicates the pleasure by marring the surface, leaving stray, seemingly random scars on the canvas and establishing a tension between the long view into moody nothingness and, closer by, the specific marks of an artist asserting her presence. Does space, painted in emotional orange or unblinking blue, seem safer with bars stretched across it, guards to keep infinity from sucking us out the window? Or do the straight lines emphasize the wildness of the color? Tureen’s stripes are rough-surfaced, compared to the burnished quality of much of the ground between them, and they tend to disintegrate at the edges of the picture, suggesting that order is only temporary.

The spare geometry of crosses can be read in many languages. The spring-green lines of #12 might be a Christian symbol against the pink-and-yellow mist of Easter morning. In #3, where the square canvas is bright, Byzantine gold leaf, the red and violet lines across it look like ribbons drawn tight on a shiny gift package. The blue plaid strands in #9 could be steel bridge beams. There’s lots of zooming momentum, in several directions — the rocket trip out into glowing color, and the sideways collision of vertical and horizontal, their gears grinding and creating visual gridlock. Fitzpatrick sees in the work the rare and fortunate marriage of fresh-from-school energy and a substantial body of life experience.

We can feel Tureen’s immersion in these exercises, the compositional repetition giving way here and there to a sideways stretch, a detour down one of countless side paths. A small bonfire flares in the tawny distance of #8, drawing interested attention, and in #4, abstraction bends around more elements of landscape, a purple shape like a tower and a smoky gold cloud that breaks at the center to cool clear sky. Tureen isn’t sure which way to go yet; in her creative reckoning, she hasn’t settled on one way to be, and the searching in these paintings feels right for this particular season. All of us are figuring out how to proceed over uncharted territory, how to be in an altered reality. Every ending, as they say, brings a beginning.

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