Sherri Wolfgang
“Each painting is its own episode, when put together they run like a full season of Portlandia.”
- Sandra Botnen, curator
“They are less concerned with beauty, and more driven by raw emotion,”
Day 19 introduces Sherri Wolfgang, the second fine art portrait artist to be featured in the ThirtyDayGallery this month. Her current work is a series called American Pathos depicting a diverse group of millennials. They show up on her canvasses, often in clusters, to create easy going narrative compositions. Each painting is its own episode, when put together they run like a full season of Portlandia. The cast is made up of nine models, two of which are her own daughters. As a mother having raised millennials, the insight Wolfgang injects into her work runs deep, her commentary on the next generation is nuances with both criticism and hope.
Visiting her studio in Westport Connecticut, I was able to see her some of her works in progress. She has been working on this particular series for a few years already, with its completion not far off on the horizon. It is her normal routine to grab on to an idea or a theme, then take 3-4 years to create the cohesive series, with each individual painting taking about 6 months. “I have plenty of ideas,” she says, “but they don’t all take hold.” From what I can see, this series American Pathos is fully crystallized in terms of its expression, and yet what appears to be her most ambitious piece hangs on the wall as highly articulated drawing on canvas. The painting has not yet begun.
“I need to finish it for my show this summer, but I also need to finish so I can move on,” she says. When I ask about her next subject of interest, she says she doesn’t know, repeating, “I have lots of ideas, but they don’t all take hold.” It sounds like her subject matter chooses her as much as she chooses it.
One of her previous series featured a single male dancer against a richly textured burnt orange background. She captured the dancer in numerous, slightly off-balance, poses. The dancer’s asymmetrical, even awkward positions are overcome by poise and a musculature that transcends the parameters of ordinary human movement.
Twisted is another of her series which looks at mental illness and plastic surgery. She describes the works in this series as more highly narrative. “They are less concerned with beauty, and more driven by raw emotion,” she says. The painting I am looking at portrays three women sitting around a table. One has her breast laying on the table, while another smokes a cigarette. Another is shaved bald and the center figure’s face is fully wrapped in gauze. Together they laugh - seemingly jovial, but I assume medicated. The women are garish, and to get swept up in the painting is to actually hear the ring of their cacophonic throaty laughter. This is the power of Sherri Wolfgang’s paintings, full of life and possibility, both good and bad.
What is often challenging about portraiture in general, is overcoming the obstacles of bringing such characters, strangers in fact, into your home. In the context of fine art, I think of these figures as representations of an idea, sometimes a cautionary tale, and often straight up testaments of our times. But the skill of a realist painter might just bring such a warm-blooded finesse to their figures that you end up with more than you bargained for. Imagining the cackling laughter is just one example of countless experiences a viewer might have when taking in one of Wolfgang’s works.
American Pathos offers a softer approach. While revealing skepticism and futility with regards to this new generation, Wolfgang argues, “they are also beautiful”. One image shows a couple on a hammock holding a bowl of lemons gleaming in the sunlight. They are young adults, in a beautiful time of life, not quite real adults, not yet burdened and passionatly looking toward a more peaceful and equitable future. Full of angst but for the moment they are beautiful. A marked moment in time that could make a greater difference than any other.
Wolfgang speaks of today’s painter as yesterday’s historians. More documentation hardly seems necessary with all the quick sharing of videos and selfies, but Wolfgang’s images are cause for pause. There is still an element of art today that does document time. And stepping back to appreciate art as a historical document for me is like seeing though time, revealing that which is constant and that which has the power to creates itself brand new and totally different.