You enjoy myself

Toni Wolf’s self-portraits at the Hay

By Jenna Russell

Toni Wolf shows, with Lydia Paiste and Renee Bouchard, through Oct. 27, at the Hay Gallery in Portland. Call (207) 773-2513.

“MOCK TURTLE,”: “Winter Again” by Toni Wolf.

Most people, insecure or overconfident, have done the mirror tour. It’s Saturday, maybe, or a sick day, and you’re wandering from mirror to mirror through the house, watching what the different light does to your face in each one. You’re mesmerized by one of two things, or maybe both. There’s the inescapability of those same old features, the ones you never chose, and then there’s the weird degree of changeability possible between one mirror image and another.

Walking into Toni Wolf’s show of acrylic self-portraits at the Hay Gallery is like revisiting one of those aimless afternoons. The sensations, though triggered by a stranger’s face, are similar. There’s a trapped feeling — no escape from the critical gaze — tempered by the comfort of the familiar. The more portraits we study, the stronger our imagined sense of understanding, and the greater our sensitivity to subtle rearrangements of the subject’s expression and surroundings.

Wolf explains in an articulate artist’s statement that her habit of painting herself “has nothing to do with wanting lots of pictures of me . . . It’s all just paint. It could just as easily be landscape, abstract, or cartoon. For me, it comes out self-portrait.” In the last three years, the Portland artist sustained a series of losses, including those of both her parents, and she says the exhibition of portraits, on view through October 28, helped her review the past “before moving on to whatever’s next.”

The paintings span 1995 to 2001, and are done in an Impressionistic style that calls to mind Cezanne, or Matisse’s early portraits of his wife. A few square inches of flesh might contain a near-complete spectrum, as in “Below Normal,” where Wolf’s face is made of patches of mint green, yellow ocher, rose, rust, brown, and gray. Her face is acorn-shaped, narrow and triangular, and it takes up most of each canvas. Landscape peeks out behind, bright yellow forsythia, autumn trees or crisp architectural curves. In the recent “Sea Spot #3,” her head looks sculpted and massive, the most prominent outcropping of the ocean-beaten rocks behind it.

Some portraits make symbols of simple objects that appear on the fringes and are never the focus. In “N-NE,” an eerie painting from 1999, Wolf holds a compass low in the frame. Her worried look suggests she’s not sure where she’s going, and the composition and unsettled mood echo Munch’s “The Scream.” With shorn hair and strong features, she could be man or woman. Hanging nearby is “Many Oysters . . . Few Pearls,” painted the same year. The title alludes to disappointment, but Wolf’s expression here is without anxiety or regret. She tosses an empty shell aside, seeming nonchalant and accepting.

Wolf takes symbolic narrative to the next level in the dark, striking “I’m Not From Here . . . I Just Live Here” (1998), one of the show’s most accomplished pieces. This figure is less obviously the artist, and less realistically human, its spoon-shaped head folded sideways against a shoulder at a tight, physically impossible right angle. Disaster fills the background, in a hot, desert palette, as flames shoot from the windows of tall buildings. The mixture of strangeness and beauty, symbol and story, reminds one of Maine painter Robert Shetterly. The painting seems to describe a disconnect between self and environment. Yet the viewer’s instinct is to connect, and she has to fight the impulse to turn her own head sideways to meet the subject’s gaze.

The main room of the Hay Gallery has always been a jewel, and with the clutter cleared out under new ownership, the unique space is magnificent. (The smaller back rooms have been redone, and are well-used this month as intimate settings for small, engaging shows by two artists. Lydia Paiste makes vivid and funny mixed-media sculptures featuring tiny dolls and poodles in suburban and exotic locales. She’s effectively paired with Renee Bouchard, whose dreamy, elegant oil paintings on goatskin are extra-terrestrial landscapes of billowing tents and hanging lanterns in colors like chartreuse and marigold.)

In the main room, on the wall above the staircase, a series of acrylics by Wolf titled “I Grew Up with a Magnolia Outside My Bedroom Window” delivers quiet, devastating impact. Bangs and braids alternate in a progression of self-portraits from childhood and adolescence; the smiling faces, clearly based on school pictures, alternate with studies of a magnolia flower accelerating from bud to blossom to drooping death at the end of its cycle. Youth goes quickly, its brief bloom depicted here in the dusky pinks of memory. The piece is poignant as a memorial, for someone the artist used to be, who no longer exists.

Later, when Wolf wears the slower-aging face of an adult, the quick-change scenery behind her lets the paintings be read as snapshots from one long road trip, informed by the universal road-trip fantasy of going somewhere new and waking up as someone different. Wolf is never less than recognizable, however, blurred and muted in “Fog” or curled into the fetal position in “Hammock.” Part of what the show affirms in raw, insistent terms is that survival. She endures death and winter, and, as the paintings testify, stays herself.

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