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 Alicia
Mannix's art lives in a place where accidents rule. Chance strokes
and happenstance meetings of sponges and other unlikely objects
are the stuff of her collage, paintings and mixed media.
“I use pretty
much everything but brushes," Mannix. says.
"I'm
covered in paint when I paint. I dig my hands in and smear it
around."
Using, say,
a squeegee and a cleaning brush, maybe some old drop cloths,
she creates paintings that resemble the gestural expressionism
of a Willem de Kooning or a Jackson Pollock.
An exhibit
of recent artworks by Mannix opened Friday at the Conversations
With God Center at 400 Williamson St., just off Hersey Street
in Ashland. The show remains up for a month.
Mannix says
she felt artistically blocked for along time. She credits her
new burst of creativity (three solo exhibits in less than one
year) to pouring out her feelings in writing.
Mannix, 47,
came to the United States from her native Poland more than 30
years ago. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in art and
art history from the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins
University and spent years critiquing painting.
"It's
very snobbish and theory‑ oriented," she says. "None
of (the critics) ever painted."
Mannix has
lived in Southern Oregon 10 years, the last four in Ashland. She's
the mother of an 8‑year‑old boy and two adult children.
Her son Thomas,
chafing at Mannix's art stuff spread about, recently said, "Mom,
I'm tired of it. This is not an art gallery."
Mannix calls
her style of painting Spontaneous Expressionism. Pieces run from
still I life to abstract.
She says the
key for her is to skip entirely any preconceived image and just
start sketching. Sometimes surprising things emerge. What looks
like a framed desert rock is actually cardboard with glue rubbed
over the top and paint on top of that. Another painting that came
pouring out is a mother cradling a baby done in bold swaths of
yellow, brown, blue and red. She describes the piece and its Madonna
theme as almost an accident. It started when she was playing with
making circles in a new‑to‑her medium called gouache,
a very thick water color. "I didn't have much time to work
on it," she says. "My daughter came home from college
and saw it and started freaking out. She ran to her backpack and
took out a poem and started reading." The poem reads in part:
I saw a picture
of us
today
A mother in thick robes
over her head
cradling a suckling child.
I saw a faded and mushy
browns and yellows and blues....
Many of Mannix's
artworks crowd into her home, turning it into what could pass
for an impromptu gallery.
"Viewing
them all at once can be a dizzying experience," her
friend Chris Ammon says.
Mannix says
she focuses not on. product but process.
"The
result is a combination of expressionism and my aesthetic sensibility
and training."
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