Cushing painter a latter-day surrealist Exhibit by Alan Clark opens at Farnsworth

“Vive le surrealisme!” That’s how Timothy Baum, an authority on the surrealists, ends his exuberant essay in the catalog for the exhibition “The Invisible Revealed: Surrealist Drawings from the Drukier Collection” currently at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (through June 6).

Alan Clark, whose show “Blood and Stone” recently opened at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, would second Baum’s cry. This painter from Cushing practices a mode of art-making that harks back to automatism, a method favored by the surrealists, whereby an artist seeks to create imagery without the intervention of conscious thought or will. Compare Clark’s “Alert Eruption,” 1993, and “Untitled (Landscape),” 1936-37, by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911-2003) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Both pieces offer alternative worlds where mountainsides become butterfly wings and plant forms take on human anatomical forms.

Like his surrealist brethren of yore, Clark does not approach paper or canvas with a specific intention, but rather with the spark of a desire that spurs him to make lines and marks that evolve into complex and compelling compositions. “It’s not a choice that I’m making,” he notes in an essay by D.A. Wolf that accompanies the show. “My work is about the reality of the imagination.” Such statements would make Dali smile, knowingly.

Clark’s exhibition features 30 watercolors on paper, nearly all of them around 12 by 12 inches – miniatures of a sort, although what is presented within these measurements often takes on cosmic proportions. Some pieces are kaleidoscopic, even psychedelic, combining stars and landscapes, morphing figures and extraterrestrial flora. Others seem more deliberate, such as the humorous “Is Able,” 1996, which depicts a frog with red lips standing on its hind legs, “hands” on its hips. Yet even this fantasy may have been the result of random beginnings.

Since 1991 Clark has spent part of each year on Mexico’s island of Cozumel, and his experience and knowledge of Mexican culture influence many of his inventions. The skeletal figure in “Mexicanismo,” 1997, evokes Day of the Dead celebrations, while the visage in “Via Olmeca,” writes essayist Wolf, resembles “the stone heads of the Olmec civilization.”

Born in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1945, Clark moved to Augusta as a child and attended Colby College, studying English literature and art history. His writings include poetry, prose and a play, “Guerrero,” which was first performed at the Farnsworth in 1997. From the examples in the exhibition catalog, Clark’s writings share the freedom and inventiveness found in his paintings.

One of Clark’s poems begins, “Come into a heart and listen and look.” He offers a similar invitation in his paintings. Enter the Craig Gallery at the Farnsworth Art Museum and share in his vision.

“Blood and Stone: The Paintings of Alan Clark,” curated by Helen Austin Fisher, runs through July 26. Call 596-6457 or go to www.farnsworthmuseum.org for hours and admission information. Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.