Reflections of the world Current events fuel Solon painter’s work

There is a theory that when a butterfly in the rain forest of South America unfurls its wings, the repercussions are felt in every corner of the world. That relationship, the intricate web that connects all events with all people, is no more keenly felt than in a hilltop artist’s studio in Solon.

Abby Shahn, 65, is an activist, a political observer, an environmentalist, and an artist with a sly sense of humor. She is as likely to be found standing in a yellow slicker during a rainstorm at a environmental protest in downtown Athens as she is performing with the In Spite Of Life Players in their annual Fourth of July satirical plays staged in a gravel pit.

Shahn, looking a bit like Mother Earth herself – loose clothes a bit rumpled, reams of curly black hair swirling around her face – sits in her studio in an ancient easy chair unintentionally decorated with multicolored dabs of paint. The stuffing is trying to escape in worn places, and the legs feel a bit wobbly. It’s from the worn chair, while assessing her paintings in the works, that Shahn contemplates the events of the world. As she does, her feelings about the wars, the disasters, the big and little inhumanities slide into her paintings.

Her current work is a huge explosion of color, small lines and dabs swirling and encircling a bright yellow sun. “I lost a number of friends recently, all at the same time,” Shahn explains. “So I came out here determined to create a memorial. But then Hurricane Katrina hit.”

The result is a work in progress that reflects loss, love, the world spinning out of control, and remembrance. If Shahn’s studio is her sanctuary, then her paintings are her prayers – not representing what she sees, but much more powerfully, revealing what she feels.

Sinking deeper into her armchair, Shahn says, “I am moved by political events. I just start smooshing the paint. The ideas come from the paint.”

Shahn, the daughter of internationally revered artist Ben Shahn, was educated in New York City, Oregon and California and spent two summers at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been a teacher in residence at Haystack School of Crafts, the University of Southern Maine, College of the Atlantic, and the Maine College of Art.

It was summers in Maine that convinced Shahn to homestead here in 1969, as part of the back-to-the-land movement from which hidden artists’ colonies were founded, such as the one in rural Solon and nearby Athens.

Her artists’ compound, which she shares with assemblage and shrine artist James Fangbone, consists of three buildings – a home and two studios, tucked in a hillside off a dirt road and marked by a dark red fish sculpture hanging from a tree.

A polka-dot mailbox directs visitors to a steep driveway edged by Fangbone’s bottle trees – brilliant blue bottles speared by branches. “The evil spirits get trapped in the bottles and can’t get out,” Shahn says.

Shahn’s home is an explosion of creativity, thought and passion. She and Fangbone started with a single structure, then began adding rooms the way children build with Legos. It’s long and rambling, built on several levels with huge windows looking out into the woods. Every nook and cranny is covered by items, icons and art. A manhole grate is a tabletop. A stuffed leather valise becomes a hassock.

One of Shahn’s huge paintings, “Surgical Strike,” dominates a living area. It is an explosion of reds, oranges, and yellows on a brilliant blue background, her reaction to the start of the Iraq war.

While walking up the hill to her studio, Shahn explains her painting method. “There’s no destination,” she says. “If I begin to get too intentional, I make really dumb moves. I just keep painting, and it evolves.”

Coming in from the twilight of the day, with darkness moving in and snow covering the ground, the colors of her paintings are like having cold water thrown in your face. Wake up, they say. Pay attention.

“Color is as strong an element to the painting as line,” she says.

She wrangles a triptych, “All Hell Broke Loose,” from its storage place. Three paintings, rich in reds, blues and white, are cut through with black figures, lines and shapes. It is the Afghanistan war, as seen by Shahn’s heart.

“I was just bewildered by this,” she says. “I had to process it through painting.”

Shahn said she became well known for egg tempera paintings of hundreds of small squares, almost quilts of paint. Some of these works are in the permanent collections at Colby College, the Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, the Portland Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

But when she shifted to the more abstract political works, some of her fans were discontent. “Marketwise, people want you to be like McDonald’s hamburgers – reliable, constant and producing a recognizable object,” Shahn laments.

But, she adds, “Sometimes you want to eat Chinese. Sometimes you want to eat Indian. Sometimes you want to walk in the woods, and sometimes you want to stay home and read a book. It is all part of my persona and it is reflected in my paintings.”

A painting may start off to reflect her feeling on eco-terrorism, for example, and end up merging with another political event. “It may become something else entirely,” she says. It can take two or three years before the work is completed.

Shahn sits in her easy chair and takes a quiet moment to look around at the dozens of works – some completed, some in progress – hanging or stacked in the studio. The wood stove crackles and the light outside is nearly gone.

“I wish I had more walls,” she says.

Shahn’s artwork will be featured this fall at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland. Sharon Kiley Mack can be reached at 487-3187 and bdnpittsfield@verizon.net.