Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 25, 1995 TAG: 9501270012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Installed in one of the museum's smaller rooms, "Lands of Mystery and Wonder" is a series of landscape epiphanies whose peculiar effect is concentrated by the small space.
A female form seemingly composed of thorns explodes into a mass of roses. Wolves with glittering eyes peer out of a cold northern forest. Rabbits, snakes and birds are covered with stars and diamonds and helixes. A woman is either turning into or emerging from a tree.
Throughout most of the six multipanel pictures is a riot of stylized pattern that binds plant and animal and inanimate matter. What is going on in these jewel-like watercolors?
"Everything I've done has always been highly colored and highly patterned," said the 38-year-old artist, who moved to Snow Creek in Franklin County three and a half years ago.
"Lands of Mystery and Wonder: Watercolors by Donna Essig" is the final exhibit in a series by contemporary Virginia artists underwritten by the Norfolk Southern Foundation.
Color and pattern are what count in Essig's day job as a color designer at Ronile Inc. in Rocky Mount, which produces color yarn for carpet manufacturers. But the contrast between Franklin County and Chicago, where she previously lived and worked, triggered new developments in her art.
"It was such a change from Chicago, which was so flat and so built-up, to come to a place with old tobacco barns overgrown with vines. The first couple of years I was down here I was painting the things I'd encounter on my walks, like pokeberries, hay bales, mountains. My first paintings here had titles like `Pond Play' and `Sumac and Antler,' ''said Essig.
But Franklin County's rolling countryside allowed free play for an idea that had previously gained a hold on her imagination: the notion of the natural world reclaiming the things of civilization. The old tobacco barns in the fields near her
house, gradually being pulled earth-ward by vines, had a strange impact on her.
"In 1987 I did a series of paintings, you'd see things like a temple or a city being overrun by nature again. In one, I painted a wolf running through a temple - the temple had become simply another part of its wilderness now, there was no sign of human life."
Does this theme hint at buried resentment against people or civilization?
"No, I like people. It's just that I have this overall view that we need things like this to remind us that we're a part of all this, that we don't hold dominion over animals or nature, that we're part of a bigger system. I like the idea of cities being taken by landscape eventually if we don't use them. I don't use that word `ecosystem,' it's a little too New Age for me. But we need to fit in rather than take over. I guess it's sort of an environmentalist point of view."
Essig says she is a member of the environmental group Greenpeace and is "very involved" in the Franklin County Humane Society.
The notion of interdependence and the mysterious power of nature to erase signs of human presence is a theme of "Lands of Mystery and Wonder." The multipaneled paintings titled "Savanna," "Tundra," "Desert" and "Sea" pulse with jewel tones and intricate patterning. The more time you devote to a picture, the more animals and plants seem to emerge from the complex design matrix.
Each painting evokes a particular terrain or habitat, with a characteristic color scheme. "Tundra" is dominated by cold blues and greens; "Desert" is filled with warm yellows and browns.
In "Great Mother Tree," a female form is caught in metamorphosis between tree and human being, surrounded by lush, almost menacing, jungle plant and animal life.
In "What Once Bonded Now Separates," a female figure has been either changed into or is covered by briars. Kneeling as if overpowered by some great emotion, she raises her arms, which erupt with an outpouring of roses above her head.
"The woman in briars is the transition from the tobacco barn - she is still somewhat figurative but she is becoming landscape. This one has a little to do with relationships: what first begins to bind her to someone, the briars, eventually becomes a barrier. It's almost like Briar Rose, the old Sleeping Beauty myth," said Essig.
``Lands of Mystery and Wonder: Watercolors by Donna Essig": Through April 21, Norfolk Southern Gallery, Art Museum of Western Virginia, Center in the Square, downtown Roanoke. There will be a reception with a gallery talk by the artist Feb. 3, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the museum. 342-5760.
by CNB