Phyllis Shafer: A Painter's Journey by Kirk Robertson
Artweek, May 2007.


A Painter's Journey: The Sonoran Desert to the Sierra Nevada presented a generous selection of recent gouaches and oil-on-canvas paintings and that drew, literally and metaphorically, upon the two distinctly different Western scapes.

The works are rendered in an idiomatic magical realism, conveying a world we recognize but that is somehow different, the qualities of the real amplified in a series of labyrinthine snapshot narratives that suggest the magic, the power, inherent in natural forms.

The Sierra Nevada works generally "focus" on a body of water presented as the primary character in a "dished-scape" that evokes, through perfectly conjured false vanishing points, not only the curvature of the earth, but also sipapu, points of entry or emergence between this world and another, between out-there and in-here, up-above and down-below.

They are evocations of frozen plein air moments—a morning or afternoon—and possess a pristine idyllic quietness under skies laced, streaked or dotted with clouds pulsing in the wind, harbingers of change. The bounce between earth and sky gives the pieces a certain charge, a pulse, especially in a piece like the gouache, White Cloud, where the landscape is both a fantastically "real" place and the eroticized sexual bodyscape of a reclining nude.

The desert pieces blur the boundaries between real and imagined even more. The gouache, Desert Vista, with its slightly skewed perspective, bounces between totally real and totally surreal with its uncanny ridges of sand and the cholla's efflorescence. Again, the skies are always alive, changing, time collapsing the moment of perception into a invented imagining.

Another gouache, Ocotillo Dance is a carefully choreographed scene which is reminiscent of the poetry of Richard Shelton:

            the arms of the ocotillo
            bend toward the earth\
            and at the end of each arm
            is a hand filled with blood.

Shafer's visual equivalent of Shelton's poem vibrates with a feeling that can definitely be called magical, its mushroomic allusions almost palpable.

The desert works seem to suggest a state of being analogous to Carlos Casteneda's don Juan, who took him out into the Sonoran Desert so he could stop the world, create a state of awareness where everyday reality was altered, stop the flow of interpretations and see something else.

In San Cayetano Afternoon, a 24x30" oil on canvas work, the artist gives us an inter-species garden party: ocotillo, cholla, greasewood, palo verde and prickly pear—rendered in a wide range of stances and attitudes—have all gathered around, pulsing with life, just so damn glad to be here, now, in an early spring trice.

Overall, the gouaches are more successful than the oils; perhaps because their more intimate 13 x 17" scale draws the viewer into the artist's magical world and the rhythms that animate it via her deft ability to capture the minutiae and essence of her characters.

The intensity of the artist's execution of the gouaches—dense, precisely rendered flora—also calls to mind Mughal miniature paintings. Both can be seen as an active engaging with the visible world. Observing objects and making likenesses of them—a lyrical concatenation of excess, a source of new ways of seeing—is an inward-directed journey, an antidote against assuming that our perceptions are the only source for knowledge of reality.

It is in this interior fictive realm that Shafer finds respite on her journey, takes shelter, juggling micro- and macrocosms to realize another line of Shelton's:

            living in the desert
            has taught me to go inside myself
            for shade.

Kirk Robertson
Fallon, NV
March, 2007


Return to the Articles section