Manic Master

BY MARK AWODEY

"Manic Abstractions," paintings by Mikey Welsh
The Gallery at Opaline in Burlington.
Through May.


photo on left:

"Bird Head and Fish"
diptych - each 3x5 feet, acrylic on canvas


On the Internet and in the news media, painter Mikey Welsh is always referred to as "former Weezer bass player Mikey Welsh." That's because Weezer is a famous pop band that Welsh left a few years ago. But the ex-Weezer's exhibition, entitled "Manic Abstractions" and currently showing at The Gallery at Opaline in Burlington, is strong in its own right. So are the works by the other two artists presented along with Welsh. Accompanying his 70 mixed-media acrylics are 35 pieces by Sage Tucker Ketcham and eight body-print paintings by Liana Malm-Levine.

Welsh is a prodigious and prolific painter who produced most of his collection in just a few months - sometimes at the rate of several paintings a day. Despite the creative frenzy, he realizes he's standing on the shoulders of giants. According to curator John E. Bates, Welsh's works are informed by a thorough study of postmodern German Expressionist Georg Baselitz, as well as by the first-generation American Abstract Expressionists, notably Pollock and de Kooning.

"Blue Fish," "Sunbathing," "The Queen" and "Under the Blanket" comprise a quartet of large canvasses hung together, up to 5-by-5 feet, that all began on a white ground. Welsh then attacked all four picture planes with bright primary colors and limited doses of olive green. He slashed with the brush and blended colors directly on the canvasses. Their titles seem to have been designated after the fact, because the paintings are pure energy, with practically no narrative content beyond what the subconscious might suggest.

Welsh's diptych "Bird Head and Fish" is chromatically more complex. In the 6-by-5-foot modified drip painting, an inferno of warm colors blazes across a blue-green field. The drips seem to be suspended over broader swaths of cool color.

Several of Welsh's paintings have collage elements, but they are often just shreds of newspaper. "Boy in the Paper Hat" has newspaper bits embedded in its tumultuous paint handling. The vague details of a face are present in that piece, but Welsh has also produced a substantial number of paintings on panel, called his "Face Series," that are specifically tormented portraits. Titles in the group include "Karl's Machete," "Electric Chair" and "Egg Monday." While they appear at first to be angst-ridden outbursts of color and line, the twisted faces of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and graphics by Oscar Kokoschka also come to mind.

Ketcham's contribution to the exhibition is also impressive. She shouldn't be regarded here as second fiddle to Welsh. Her own visage pieces, such as "Face 1" and "Face 2," display a more peaceful, illustrative drawing style. Soft, gestural contour lines delineate the features within flat, gray haloes surrounded by fire-engine red.

"Little Face" is actually a 5-foot-tall, vertical triptych. The three background colors are peach, pale green and light blue, respectively. Ketchum outlined tubular rope forms and placed unobtrusive faces within them. "Look Up Look Down" is a larger, more complicated work - a broader triptych about 10 feet long and full of small, organic shapes. There is a forest of snaky forms beneath an oval above, like an abstracted cloud dangling in a peach-colored sky.

Malm-Levine creates by pressing her painted, nude body directly onto canvasses. Her hair becomes a hard-edged aggregation of shapes, generally a different hue than the body. Backgrounds are often flatly painted in the same style as Ketcham’s. They measure about 40 by 30 inches. The "Untitled" body prints seem like refugees from the 1960s, even though all are essentially self-portraits. With sharply defined features, Malm-Levine turns herself into an anonymous icon, not unlike the banal objects with equally intense colors found in Andy Warhol's Pop Art silkscreens.

Welsh is more than just a bass player who left the music business. As he revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone, he's also "a recovering addict." But ultimately all that matters is the art. Welsh's paintings deserve attention regardless of the artist's past, not because of it. Even if he had never been interviewed by a national music magazine, his work would still have been worth mentioning in Art News. And unless he played like Jaco Pastorius, it's hard to believe that Welsh's bass lines were ever as exceptional as his brush strokes.

Seven Days Newspaper, 05/19/04 www.sevendaysvt.com