McGuffey October 2023 from Alan Kindler

Charlottesville’s McGuffey Art Center’s October show is notable for its breadth of creative effort. You’ll find floral work and colorful, serene landscapes on the first floor. In pleasing counterpoint, Alan Kindler, new to the area and McGuffey, is showing work of particular interest. His statement for Turtles All The Way Down (a title that captures both the whimsy and gravity of his work) explains that he’s a relatively young artist at sixty-seven, having taken up oil painting nine years ago. Inspired by classical painters, he centers the human figure in his pieces, providing for them a Jungian dreamscape of an environment. How much the resulting tableau tell us about the artist and how much they tell us about ourselves is left to the viewer to decide.

Kindler invites us to engage with the paintings as if they are dreams and to reflect back what they mean to us “as if they were (our) painting”, a practice that comes from the painter's experience with Jungian projective dream work. If that’s an unknown practice for you, let me try to apply that approach to one of the pieces in the show, In The Garden of E. D. Playfully, the artist has a notebook beside the painting asking us to suggest what words E. and D. are the initials of. Also, in an effort to invite connection, which he notes is the primary impulse of this urge to paint, he’s provided a QR code that launches an email, inviting us to comment on each piece.

So, after standing before the painting for some time, which is mandatory if one wants to notice all the details in this expansive world, I began to understand what the artist intends when he says that “the meaning resides as much in the relationship between the symbols as in those objects”. I first noticed a well-formed man seated on an alligator (looking at me with a wolfish grin) who appears to be having an argument with a head in his lap (his penis?). Behind him a white woman lies relaxed in the arms of a standing black man. Note that Kindler’s figures are rarely clothed. In fact, human-made objects are absent from these pieces. Is the woman conscious, willing, as she’s carried by the man? His expression is benign - he seems to be looking thoughtfully into the distance behind us. Her face is obscured. But she’s got one hand languidly grasping his shoulder. Her other hand hangs loose, but may have just released the rose that floats above the tableau and has been painted as if it lies on the surface of the painting itself, in the viewer’s world.

There’s a lot to unpack in just this portion of the painting. And this is only a portion - this and another piece in the show are a diptych capable of being rearranged into four different orientations because each edge matches seamlessly with the other panel. You could tile these into an infinite world, another layer of meaning inherent in Kindler’s approach to his dreamy subject matter. Is the alligator-riding man being carried through life by his lizard brain? Is he arguing with his penis, his ‘little head’, because his mental and his physical impulses are at cross purposes, a kind of E.rectile D.ysfunction?

While the ambiguity in the work allows me to imagine a range of meanings, I’m asked to project my own meaning into it. So I’ll say, yes, that is what they symbolize to me, a man who’s had that same struggle. And the woman, has she submitted enthusiastically or begrudgingly to being in the man’s arms? I would want her to be enthusiastic. I understand her reaching for the rose, a symbol of love and passion. There are rose petals flying across the second panel, strewn like a lover might across a honeymoon bed. Maybe the rose is out-of-reach and maybe she’s longing for more romance in her relationship and less alligator. I’ve seen that, too, in waking life.

The second panel in this diptych centers on two female figures in motion, one apparently emerging from a watery vortex, the other rising weightlessly and also reaching for that rose. The first woman has a mermaid’s tail. For me she’s the companion to the alligator-riding man, a woman connected to her watery origin and her animal self. I notice that her tail ends in grasping fingers, also arrayed, in one of the clever convolutions of the rearrangement of this diptych, in a longing grasp toward the rose. And these are just the foreground figures. I count seven others, both men and women (and an inter-sex figure) in the background. The viewer will find meaning in them all. And I’ll leave that to you.

In a recent blog post Kindler describes his work as stories in a forgotten language. He invites us to be comfortable with ambiguity and to embrace the uncertainty in his paintings. On this scrim we project our own meaning so that the stories are not about the artist alone but about all of us. It occurs to me that in a time when fear is a full-blown contagion in our society, that seeking the universal and the common ground of deeper human experience is an act of resistance in itself.

From this scratching of the surface of In The Garden of E. D. you can see that there’s much to mine from viewing these works. Come to the show with patience and spend time with each painting or with just one. The wealth of insight into yourself will be worth the time.

McGuffey’s opening reception for all the artists in this show is at 6 pm, Oct 6, 2023. The show runs from October 2 through 29.