B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

Open sky, big splash: Pat Steir follows her muse

By Taylor McNeil

Visual art can reflect the times, social trends, and artistic movements, but in the end, it's mostly a reflection of the artist. At least that's true of the work of Pat Steir (SFA'60), the painter and printmaker whose works are in such collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery in England, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in France.

	Pat Steir, Starry Night, photogravure and aquatint, 27 7/8'' x 25 3/4'', 2000.

As the years have passed and successive artistic movements have arisen and fallen away, Steir has found that what's most important is not the influences of those around her, but who she is. "My work reflects who I am," she says. "My idea of art has always been that you follow who you are. Your art is you, the way your height is you. You can change a lot about yourself, cosmetically and surgically, but you can't change your height, aside from high heels or flats. It's like that."

Certainly there are styles that have informed her, such as Chinese landscape painting in her recent works, but throughout her career, Steir says, "I have been following my own questions about reality." Even so, she's always been a student of history, she says, and that's evident in The Brueghel Series (A Vanity of Styles). One of her most famous works, it is an extended commentary on art styles and movements. The Brueghel painting, done in the early 1980s, "has become a textbook example of postmodernism," says John Stomberg, director of the Boston University Art Gallery. Made up of 64 panels on a grid, each 26 1/2'' x 21'' and painted in the style of a different artist, from Botticelli to Watteau, Pollock to Picasso, it is an enormous painting whose mosaic effect creates a still life vase of flowers. "It incorporated all sorts of the intellectual ideas, picking and choosing from styles, allowing for extrinsic values of art that had to do with art history," Stomberg says. "The painting became an enormous revolution and really established her."

Soon she was making waves again, in a manner of speaking. "When I did the Brueghel painting, through my study of Impressionism I got interested in Japan- ism," she says. Steir's study of the style is obvious in a series of paintings from the mid-1980s, abstract yet visibly real paintings of waves. With wry, self-aware titles such as The Wave After Courbet as Though Painted by Turner with the Chinese in Mind (1985), Steir paid homage to past masters with an entirely new viewpoint.

Pat Steir, August Waterfall, photogravure and aquatint, 28 7/8'' x 24'', 2000.

What followed was a series of paintings and prints of abstract yet representational waterfalls and open sky views, inspired in part by the Chinese landscape paintings she has been interested in since youth, but which are clearly her own. "I used something similar to a method I had read about but not seen in Japanese calligraphy and painting, sometimes called flung ink, other times referred to as outsider painting," she says. "It is a way of using chance in a very controlled manner, as the ink hits the canvas and drips, pulled by gravity to a random stopping point."

That her work is quite abstract and still conjures waterfalls, landscapes, waves, and starry skies is entirely intentional. "It's what I want to do," she says. "It's the whole point." And, she adds sharply, it is not both abstract and representational. "Abstraction and representation are one thing. I don't see them as two separate things. Once something is a painting, it's abstract. . . . Or you can see it as all realistic, lines on a surface, and a line represents itself as a line. They are not different things; they are all part of the same thing."

Steir's latest prints look much like her paintings, intentional and fluid, yet also frozen in place. That the two look so similar is no coincidence, of course. "I use printmaking as a drawing technique, really, as a way to think through work," she says. "It's part of the thought process for me." But her prints, she adds, are as important as her paintings.

Although known mainly as a painter, Steir is highly regarded in the printmaking community. "She is an illustrious artist and wonderful printmaker," says SFA Assistant Professor Deborah Cornell. "Her work utilizes that sense of printmaking as a remembered moment. There is a great deal of tension between the sense of gesture and the immediacy of the materials -- a cast moment, when the print is impressed into paper."

Her latest efforts -- dreamy, open spaces awash in color -- are a natural extension of the work that preceded it, she says. "What looks like a change is actually one foot after the other, like climbing a mountain, walking a path. I don't really force change; I don't look for change. I just let it happen naturally, the way one changes in life, just naturally."

Pat Steir: Recent Prints is showing at the GSU's Sherman Gallery through April 22, in conjunction with the Boston Printmakers Biennial. Steir will receive the SFA visual arts division's Distinguished Alumni Award on Saturday, April 21, at SFA. She will also give a brief talk on April 21 at 2 p.m. at the GSU's Sherman Gallery.

16 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations