Sherrard Grauer: Variousness in the Service of a Singular Vision

by J. Sanders Eaton

Someone once said that "style is character," and certainly the work of Vancouver artist Sherrard Grauer proves this point auspiciously, on evidence of her website: http://www.sherrardgrauer.com/.

"Seems to me my handwriting's all over everything, willy nilly," the artist states, "and I've never been able to draw a clear line between drawing, painting, and 2-D or 3-D."

Rather than trying to contrive a so-called "signature style," in other words, Grauer trust to her particular world view and way of working to lend her eclectic output a deeper consistency. And she succeeds splendidly in imbuing a broad range of modes and mediums - including painting, relief, sculpture, and works on paper - with the coherence of an overall vision.

Nature would appear to be the primary inspiration of Grauer's paintings and works on paper, making itself seen and felt to varying degrees of realism and abstraction. A painting such as "White Sky over Sasamat Street," for example partakes of a mode of genteel figuration akin to that of Fairfield Porter, with its composition centering on the tops of suburban houses and trees

By contrast, "Mountainside with Sun, Storm, and Burning Tree" deconstructs the landscape in a visionary shimmer that verges on lyrical abstraction. Similarly, "Poplars by the Cowichan River," with its composition of verdant greens and luminous yellows laid down in tactile, close-knit strokes could almost be called "abstract impressionism," while paintings such as "Across the Dark Place" seem more akin to the expressive bio-morphism of twentieth century American modernists like Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield, in their ability to evoke a sense of elemental forces and essences, rather than merely delineating the lay of the land.

What clearly connects Grauer's various modes of nature painting is their overwhelming vitalism; which is to say, the sense of a mysterious determining principle, distinct from the physical, which animates all living things. Thus, one feels that no contradictory impulse governs other paintings, such as "Ghost Dancing by Candle Light," and "Ghosts Outdoors," in which shadowy suggestions of phantom figures appear, either inhabiting smoky interior spaces or blending with equally spectral foliage. Apparently, such mysteries are accepted as simple facts of life in the paintings of Sherrard Grauer, who evokes them convincingly by virtue of her ability to view the natural and the supernatural with refreshing equanimity.

This metaphysical mood carries over into Grauer's sculptural activity, manifesting in life size wire figures that could be skeletal relatives of George Segal's plaster people, as they relax in actual chairs or otherwise deport themselves on wooden desks and other furniture, the everyday solidity of which enhances their ghostly effect.

Also included are vigorously gestural works on paper in which trees, thorns, and other natural subjects slip gracefully in and out of abstraction, as well as rugged, fossil-like wall reliefs that lend monumentality to natural topographies, often in irregularly shaped formats. These latter pieces, with their craggy, protuberant textures, have an aggressive presence to rival Schnabel's smashed plates, and are yet another facet of this venturesome artist's impressively varied oeuvre.

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