Desiree Alvarez's "Peaceable Kingdom"

Published: Wednesday, January 27, 2010
http://www.housatonictimes.com

By Jaime Ferris
Photograph: Jaime Ferris

As powdery snow dances in blustery whirlwinds across Connecticut's monochromic landscape, all many residents can think about are warmer temperatures, green grasses and fragrant blossoms.

Such a landscape seemed far from the mind of artist and poet Desiree Alvarez, who was hiking the region's trails with her dog last Saturday morning, hours before the opening reception for her exhibition, "Peaceable Kingdom," at the Minor Memorial Library Community Gallery in Roxbury. Rather, she was admiring the beauty of nature and what she considers the "seamless relationship" between nature and humans. As she put the finishing touches on two installations in the exhibition, she noted that each of her paintings is "a wish for ... peace between us and our world."

"I grew up here; I spent every weekend here," Ms. Alvarez said. She is the fourth generation of women in her family to call the woods, gardens and fields of Bridgewater home. "My great-grandmother, my great aunt, and my mother have all come to live in the house in Bridgewater - an old 19th-century tobacco barn. I grew up hiking in the woods there, where I found inspiration and sketched from nature."

While her work is inspired by nature, Ms. Alvarez strays from the trappings of realism and taps into the poetic side of her personality to infuse her work with a unique sense of whimsy and enchantment, using a palette of color as luscious as the landscapes that inspire her.

The daughter of two painters, Ms. Alvarez grew up drawing, an interest that continued well into college with studies in studio art and English literature at Wesleyan University. She furthered her studies at the Atelier Mac'Avoy; Academie Port-Royal in Paris, France, and at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she earned a master's in fine art.

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for the artist, who lives and works in New York and who still visits the region every weekend. Inspiration for "Peaceable Kingdom," she admitted, came after a visit to the Whitey Museum of American Art in New York.

"Several years ago, I saw [Pablo] Picasso's painting 'Minotaur Moving' at the Whitney Museum. It was the first time I wanted to steal a painting. It was almost small enough to slip in my handbag, but not quite," she recalled in an artist statement. "I went home to my studio and painted my own version. Picasso's minotaur drags behind a cart full of the artist's bonds to the world - a ladder, a canvas, a dead horse, a tree, a rainbow, the night sky.

"In my version, called 'Peaceable Kingdom,' a turtle drags the New York skyline and a tree full of nesting cheetahs across a jaguar backdrop. Thus began a series of open-ended allegories that nod to [American folk painter] Edward Hicks with visions of harmony between the human and the natural world," Ms. Alvarez continued, noting the inspiration from weekends in her great aunt's woods, gardens and fields in Bridgewater. "My paintings reflect a seamless relationship between the outdoors and my imagination."

Over the years, Ms. Alvarez has been an artist-in-residence at P.S. 122 in New York City and at Yaddo, an artists' working retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Her paintings and fabric art have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country and around the world, including the international drawing collaborative titled "Weather Report," and a commission for the government of Ireland, among others. Since 2002, Ms. Alvarez has taught art as an adjunct professor at New York City College of Technology, CUNY in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is a curator with exhibitions at the International Print Center and at the Walter Reade Theater Gallery at Lincoln Center.

Ms. Alvarez is also a writer whose poetry and nonfiction have been published in industry magazines and journals. She translates her love of narratives and her appreciation for nature using a variety of printmaking techniques for her giant fabric installations, as well as her oil paintings.

"I think of the works on silk as giant drawings," Ms. Alvarez said. "I've always loved the simplicity and gesture of Zen ink drawings (Zenga) made swiftly by the monks after hours of meditation and a cup of plum wine. A tradition dating back to the 1600s in Japan, Zenga is closely connected to calligraphy, often treating folkloric, animal and humorous subjects.

"In my paintings, characters shift from one state to another. The metamorphoses involve struggle and ecstasy, and are enacted on a mythic terrain. For me, the act of painting exists to give face to that which is hidden: the vibrations between creatures and their surroundings, and the structure of desire," she continued. "Each painting is a wish for the ultimate transformation - the peace between us and the world."

In the Roxbury show, Ms. Alvarez shares about a dozen of her oil paintings, each a short allegorical tale. Also on display are some of her sketches and dry-point etchings, as well as two extraordinary scrolls on silk chiffon, hanging from the ceiling of the gallery and just barely touching the floor.

"Painting on silk the way I do is incredibly challenging, which is why I love it," Ms. Alvarez noted, adding that the 18- to 20-foot scrolls are laid flat on the floor so the artist can paint them. "It is very immediate, with little room for error; you can't always tell if you've got what you want. If you don't get it the first time, you don't have it. Silk is very unforgiving. It makes watercolors seem as easy as paint with numbers," Ms. Alvarez said, looking on as the second of her silk works was hung in Roxbury.

While Ms. Alvarez finds fulfillment in sharing her linguistic and artistic wish for peace between us and our world, she admitted she could see herself doing many things.

"I always wanted to be a marine biologist ... and an actress, but art was the one that remained constant and always stayed with me. Being an artist is a hard, very solitary existence. Had I known that being an artist was this hard when I started out, I would have been an actress," Ms. Alvarez said with a chuckle.

In the depth of winter, Ms. Alvarez is looking forward to the spring, noting, "I have a seasonal studio in Bridgewater, and once spring time is here, I will be inspired by what's coming up."

"Peaceable Kingdom" is on display through Feb. 13 at the Minor Memorial Library Community Gallery, located at 23 South St. in Roxbury. It is open Monday, noon to 7 p.m.; Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It can be reached by calling 860-350-2181, or by visiting www.biblio.org/roxbury.

Sunday, April 30, 2000
Coping/Peter Edidin

"The Lonely Life of a Free Spirit"

"Art isn't easy," goes a line in Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in he Park With George"; but sometimes the artist's life can look that way. Most weekday mornings around rush hour, for example, an attractive woman can be seen rollerblading the length of TriBeCa with a bounding black-and-white dog.

Her route takes her past the Greenwich Street headquarters of Citigroup, the financial giant; among the masses of soberly attired men and women streaming into the building, a few invariably stop and look questioningly, even yearningly, as the odd couple zips by. With her long hair and her prancing dog, the woman looks like an advertisement for the bohemian life -- and the living embodiment of those Road Not Taken thoughts that occasionally ripple across the surface of even the most settled adult lives.

Desiree Alvarez is an artist. She makes extraordinary scrolls in silk and chiffon, some up to 62 feet long and covered with hand-printed etchings, woodcuts of birds, planes, eyes and other symbols. One work is an 18-foot-long woodcut of a Rapunzel-worthy woman's braid. When displayed, as several were last year in a space at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the room turned "dreamlike," one curator said.

That's the good part. Here's the hard part: all those beautiful fabric works are rolled up and stored under the bed where Ms. Alvarez lives. Being an artist in New York is to be at the center of the artistic universe, but for Ms. Alvarez, and for a great majority of those who come here, it also may mean finding yourself in your mid-30's, worried about making a living, having no obvious place in the city's getting and spending, and no place, even, where people can see your art.

"You think becoming an artist is your act of volition, but probably, it chose me," Ms. Alvarez said recently. "After college I worked in advertising. Everyone around me was really bright -- a lot of them were writers -- but they were all at least 10 years older, bitter and unhappy. I just had to get out of there while I could and try to make art."

That was more than a decade ago, after which Ms. Alvarez studied in Paris and in New York at the School for Visual Arts. She supported herself as a bartender (in the 1950's, her mother, also a painter, used to wait on tables at Cafe Figaro, in Greenwich Village), and as a studio assistant and model for the New York artist and teacher Philip Pearlstein.

Ms. Alvarez has no gallery, though a gallery owner once looked at some slides of her unconventional work and said, dubiously, "So, you think you can sell these?" Still, she has stopped in at several of the way stations manned by the artistic establishment. This year, she is an artist in residence at P.S. 122, a hotbed of new art, and in 1999, she won a $5,000 awrd from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, whose jury included Chuck Close, the capo di tutti capi of downtown artists. In 1998, she was invited to live for a spell at Yaddo, the artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

"It's never been easy to make a career here," Mr. Pearlstein said. Elsewhere in the country, young artists make art they expect to sell. In New York, serious young artists expect "to make the history of art through their art," Mr. Pearlstein said.

That kind of ambition is what draws artists to the city, to the galleries and to each others' studios. They are in search, Mr. Pearlstein said, of "the feeling of envy, jealousy and excitement" that the best new work sends pulsing through the artistic community.

Still, the real work is done in solitude, with whatever it is that drives a person to create a beautiful and new thing in the world.

Recently, instead of the diaphonous works on fabric that had preoccupied her for years, Ms. Alvarez began what she laughingly calls "my Monster Series." They are watercolors, erotic and violent portraits of recognizable movie monsters -- the vampire Nosferatu, Frankenstein, even the Bride of Frankenstein -- and their victims. Curiously, there is nothing jokey or ironic about the works. They are dead serious and completely arresting.

The images were so odd, Ms. Alvarez said, that she hid the watercolors and was going to stop working in that vein. Only after an artist friend accidentally glimpsed the monsters and raved about them did she begin to feel she wasn't wasting her time.

"It's lonely business," Ms. Alvarez said, "I mean, you're all alone with your work. Maybe it's weeks or months. And you need other artists to come over for studio visits, people who will tell you you're not out of your mind."