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Art: Desolation angel
Susan Hall's West Marin, an 'otherworldly' show at College of Marin

by Barry Willis

Pt. Reyes native Susan Hall began painting at the age of 11 and has been at it ever since—including a 1960s UC Berkeley education, when professor Mark Rothko would make weekly visits to his students' studios. Hall's was "a dilapidated artist's loft in San Francisco's North Beach"—a place so decrepit that she could see the bay through the cracks and feel the "benign presence of fog and foghorn."

Rothko was "unpretentious and quietly supportive...more interested in my process than in any particular thing I was working on," Hall recalled. His tutelage was "a profoundly validating experience that let me take myself seriously as an artist." In January 1970, she traded her North Beach loft for an "ill-lit, shabby run-down apartment" in New York City's Bowery district. The tiny bathroom served as her studio. She spent her working hours focusing intently with one tiny brush on large canvases. The subject: "women in life." Her persistence paid off with a show at the Whitney.

Hall was one of the first female artists so honored. That didn't amaze her as much as being able to see all her paintings together in a large space. Her bathroom/studio was so cramped she could never step back to see how anything looked at a distance.

The NYC art scene was also small in those days, Hall mentioned. "There were maybe 200 people in the New York art circle.... This was pre-Soho, pre-Tribeca." Andy Warhol's ascent from cult figure to dominant influence accompanied huge growth in the art world in the '80s and '90s, a period Hall describes as one where "making original art became more important than making meaningful art." Less generous observers might say the art scene took a sharp turn toward cynicism and never came back.

In the early '90s, a need for intimacy (and certain family necessities) brought Hall back to her hometown. "You've lost your New York cool," remarked the truck driver who'd hauled her belongings cross-country.

Art lovers should rejoice at what she gained. Hall's matte-finish oils capture both the desolate look and sometimes-otherworldly feel of sparsely populated West Marin. At first glance, her paintings seem to be simple snapshots of common coastal sights—an old barn, a slow-moving creek, trees against the sky, birds on a wire—imagery condensed to its most basic elements. It's a deceptive simplicity, though, because each painting implies a larger narrative—and a larger perspective.

Tricks of scale convey the immensity of nature. The title characters in "Man and Dog Playing" are barely more than little blips on a vast empty beach. Her "Horses in the Pasture" are likewise diminutive. The stark natural beauty of coastal life is a strong theme—the luminosity of "Moon and Fog," or the enduring resilience of "Live Oak."

With West Marin undeniably in her blood, Hall interprets the feel of the place with color, sometimes realistically, often not. There's a unique yellow-ochre cast to the light in West Marin, and Hall conveys this by giving many of her paintings a yellow foundation or overlay. The coast is typically cool and breezy, but there are afternoons when the heat can be devastating. Works such as "Acapella" and "California Heat" deliver this through the use of intense red-orange. The hills are never actually that color, but there are times when they feel that way.

Hall is fully in the present—there's not a hint of her substantial artistic past in this show. Her paintings are masterful, beautifully rendered and appropriately priced in the mid-four figures. Here and there around the gallery are jocular ceramic pieces that act as both counterpoint and accessory to the paintings. A relative newcomer to ceramics, Hall got into it because it seemed like fun. "I didn't want to learn rules about working with clay," she said. "I have enough burden of theory as it is." The result is that her large earthenware platters—decorated with images of trees, waterfowl and favorite pets—are as playful as the paintings are somber.

Although this is a one-woman show, visitors to COM's Fine Arts gallery will actually enjoy the work of three artists: Susan Hall, career painter; Susan Hall, naive ceramist; and Andrea Antonaccio, the gallery director who curated and installed this lovely exhibit. Meaningful art should be "soothing to the eye and reassuring to the spirit," Hall reminded an opening night gathering. "River Flowing Home" has taken that admonition to heart.

NOW SHOWING

River Flowing Home, paintings and ceramics by Susan Hall, through Oct. 23 at College of Marin Fine Arts Gallery, 835 College Ave., Kentfield; 415/485-9493, www.marin.cc.ca.us