Grant Drumheller, Artist

Every family is an enigma, not just to a stranger, but at times even to its closest members. The sunniest of interiors hold secrets. Here and there a door is shut. Someone lies with eyes closed pretending to sleep. Someone else is staring out of a window daydreaming. A household, as everyone knows, can be both heaven and hell. "Who are these people?" one wonders at times. The more we think we know them, the more they elude us. They are both familiar and remote. It's as if they stood on a kind of threshold, sometimes stepping forward toward us, sometimes stepping back into the darkness of their inner worlds. What we experience in such moments, the camera rarely records, or so I was reminded by looking at Grant Drumheller's paintings.

As in a family album, there are faces everywhere. In one painting, the artist's wife is taking a nap; in another, his daughters are making shadow puppets on the wall with their hands. There is a cat and a baby. The children are young and then they grow into moody adolescents. Nevertheless, in each painting, time stands still. The objects appear lost in reverie and so does the light falling on them. Each moment of domestic life, Drumheller knows, has its own peculiar light. The people in his portraits appear self-absorbed. Everything is made up of both dream and reality, his paintings say, even the human face.

Drumheller is both a romantic and a realist. Picasso liked to dress his children in costumes when he painted them. Drumheller, whose group scenes and landscapes can be very theatrical, prefers to paint his two daughters and his wife without props. Even when they are looking straight at us, they are playing cat-and-mouse games with their eyes. Other of his paintings recall for me Watteau's landscapes, Redon's symbolism, and Balthus's sly eroticism. Clearly, no one style can satisfy his vision. The only tradition he seems to know is the one that combines contradictory painterly impulses. Despite the misty look of some of his paintings, there are always sharply observed details in them. There is also a comic note very often. On a beach the daughters are burying their father in the sand. In two self-portraits, the artist wears gold lace over his face as if wishing to partially conceal himself. In another self-portrait, he seems thoroughly bewildered, like someone who caught sight of himself in a mirror he did not know was there.

What I like about Drumheller's paintings is that they can accommodate many shades of meaning. Even his idyllic pastoral scenes-such as the one in which the whole family runs around naked and the parents are seen tossing their children up in the air-have their dark corners, as it were. The game seems both exhilarating and terrifying. It makes one think of the paganism of family life with its secret deities and rituals. It's all about love, I kept thinking-and how could it be anything else? As with all good art, Drumheller's paintings invite us to look and then look again and again.

—Charles Simic

CHARLES SIMIC, a poet, essayist, and translator, teaches American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. He has published sixteen collections of his poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations. He has been honored with many literary awards-including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize-for his poems and translations. Voice at 3 A.M., a volume of his new poems and selected earlier poetry, was published by Harcourt in 2003.

By Katherine French

Private View: Paintings by Grant Drumheller

Most viewers acquainted with paintings by Grant Drumheller think of large canvases-monumental in size, with allusions to myth and allegory. Yet separate from these stands a collection of more intimate work. Instead of symbolic concerns, we are presented with a sharp focus on the personal, a private view into a world which is filled with complex levels of meaning.

Drumheller is a painter engaged by the materials and the history of his craft. As a student, his strong interest in the classical was informed not only by Hellenistic sculpture, but also the "bigness and simplicity" of early Picasso. Encouraged by Philip Guston to "consume both past and present," Drumheller created the monumental figure paintings for which he became known. But he also began to record his emotional life on a series of smaller canvases. Through the process of painting the classical features of his wife, Drumheller explored his personal connection to the model, as well as a painterly connection to the past. The straight bridge of her nose became "that dividing edge so significant to creating movement in Picasso. I was certainly aware of the animating effects it gave to Karina's face."

The viewer is pulled in by his obsessive studies of Karina's face and then the gradual appearance of children. Beginning with early portraits of his daughters Tess and Sarah, Drumheller painted his girls every few years the way another father might have measured and marked their height against a doorjamb. His observation makes him part of the family group, whether or not he is pictured. When his daughters come to his wife for a story, he is at the foot of the bed recording the moment. During a summer vacation, they swim toward him through a churning ocean of green water. They plant themselves comfortably in the middle of his studio, happily occupied while he completes a painting of them.

The power of these paintings grows out of Drumheller's ability to view his children on their own terms. He presents a symbolic world in which children have created their own reality, but nothing about this reality is precocious or sweet. It can appear dark and mysterious. In one of the few pictures which features a male figure, his daughters are burying their father in the sand. Although they have covered his face along with the rest of his body, Drumheller views their act as more humorous than frightening. "I felt so much that the girls were whole people," he states. Whether hiding from the family cat behind a chair or reaching for a glass perilously set near the edge of a dresser, Drumheller sees his children as "determined little people at their task."

While the growing darkness of a late afternoon or the appearance of a cat can introduce a dreamlike quality to the paintings, this symbolic reality makes sense to anyone who has raised children. Drumheller appreciates the ability of his children to make shadow figures in the light of candles after dinner or create the dollhouse in which a miniature family might live. As a painter, he is connected to the idealized world of Fragonard and Watteau when he places his family in a series of Arcadian landscapes. In Floating Family he joins his wife and children in heavenly tribute to Tiepolo. They grip their hands tightly, determined not to be parted by the swirling forces of nature. Within this perfected world, the family is protected. Children will never age and grow away from their parents. Adults will never die.

Drumheller has always been concerned with the dual desire to hold on as well as let go. When his mother died, he again used painting as a way to mourn her passing. Self-portraits became a way to examine his grief. In Grisaille with Tears, the image is animated by tears welling up in the eyes of a statue-like figure.

"I would sometimes cry while I painted," states Drumheller. "It was the most intense period of work I've ever had." Upon receiving a box of his mother's belongings, he incorporated them into his work. Draping himself with her lace scarf or wearing her jewelry, Drumheller re-creates memories of her. A silk jacket serves to "refresh his grief" for the woman who had taken her son to look at paintings by Picasso. Although he took pains to depict the box in which the jacket was sent, Drumheller does not see this as a coffin for a beloved object. Instead, tissue opens up to create a border for his Boxed Chinese Jacket. The crinkly orange paper becomes "a votive flame" around an object which recalls and represents the artist's grief.

In spite of Drumheller's long interest in mythological subject matter, he insists that the choice of fruit was "entirely unconscious" in a small still life entitled Jacket with Pomegranates. Since consumption of this fruit made it impossible for Persephone to return from the underworld, the painter is willing to admit its symbolic value as part of the traditional memento mori associated with still life painting. He turned increasingly to this genre, recognizing "some mournful aspect." While his still lifes do not present images of his family, they are the most personal of portraits. "I like the aspect of tragedy that is so easily accessed," states Drumheller.

But sadness does not define Drumheller. His children have grown, he has suffered the loss of a parent, and yet he is sustained by a private reality. Karina Sleeping in Italy recalls the conventions of painting, the various and selected meanings offered by a symbolic dreamer in an ideal landscape. The most profound meaning is personal, a serene meditation upon an actual world which, for Drumheller, has much to offer.

— Katherine French

Previous to assuming her position as Gallery Director at the Montserrat College of Art, Katherine French was the Director of Boston University's Sherman and 808 Galleries. Past catalogue publications include Nick Edmonds: A Natural World, 1972-2002 and Coming and Going: Time and Motion in the Work of Caren Canier.