Inez Storer

by Bill Berkson

Theatrical Realism: The Art of Inez Storer

Over the past decade or so, each of Inez Storer's paintings has tended to take the form of a response to a set theme. She assigns herself a subject and completes a painting accordingly, allowing for leaps of faith in her own opulent imagination. The pictures -- like discrete flash-card scenes in an extended opera about identity, history, and gender positionings -- are both fanciful and distinct. The overall approach is personal, with images that have washed up plush from the artist's soul. Stirrings of emergent occasion, once grasped, become transposed to dramatic incident, emblematic in the paint. Procedurally, this wasn't always the case: looking over an array of new work in her Point Reyes studio, Storer said, "I used to start by just making marks and letting the painting take me along, but now I have an agenda."

The amalgams in Storer's family background satisfy the prerequisites for a richly blended autobiographical art: a glitter-factory childhood in Santa Monica with "highly European-Catholic" overtones, presided over by her dancer-actress mother and her father, a Franco-Austro-Hungarian count and erstwhile aviator, who, after quitting Germany in the later 1920s, worked as an art director for Paramount (his assignments included several Billy Wilder projects and the King Vidor version of War and Peace). Her kindergarten contemporaries included Kenneth Anger -- later filmed for underground films and the seamy-side history Hollywood Babylon -- along with a number of movie-colony progency. Having been encouraged as a child in her artistic leanings, she zigzagged during the early '50s through various educational facilities in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco, finding mentors as she went (at the Pasadena Art Center, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundberg, and photographer Ed Kaminsky; at the California School of Fine Arts, Nathan Oliveira). In 1955, she moved permanently to the Bay Area, where she has since remained.

"Paint," for Storer, may comprise, beside her regular meld of oils on glazes on top of a starter layer of Golden Acrylics, an admixture of collage -- patches of old chromos and sheet music, for instances, or chintz lengths for drapery. Within a single canvas, her juicy colors may vary in thickness or texture. There are sun-dried whites, acid and powder blues, incinerated grays, aching red smears, and a blushful pink as gritty as broken brick. Standard formats are verticals and squares; horizontals seem to be reserved for large, impersonal themes -- the creation-myth-cum-dictionary-of-global-place-names in the recent Seven Days to Make the World, for instances. Some canvases are left unstretched -- originally a contingency measure against high costs of shipping crated works to Russia for a show in the early 1990s. Then, while in Petersburg, she studied turn-of-the-century dropcloth paintings of the kind that sometimes doubled as domestic winter carpeting and were later used by the Constructivists to drape revolutionary slogans from buildings along the city's public squares.

The household male and female figures in Storer's pictures are lifted from domesticity into other, plausibly mythic circumstances. Cast in luminously smudged abstract spaces, the step or swim forward into view. Old-masterish sfumato finds gainful employment as an anti-gravity device for floathing a scene in uncertain weather. Countour here is like faith in the integrity of the self. A pair of integers converges repeatedly in a kind of barometric proxinity, wearing fancy hats; the two connect and sometimes overlap, but refuse to melt. Storer's sense of activated spacial separateness and proportion in relationship is visionary. (And as contemporary views of the gender gap go, hers is spectacularly devoid of malice and rage.) It's a comic vision of married life as an improvisation of selves pressing on and outward in tandem; beyond every toehold lurks a large, possible pratfall, or worse.

Storer has spoken of her aerial vistas as having "no perspective, no beginning or end." Even so, seeing what happens within them, the viewer knows the size and distance appropriate to any detail, and the scale of the territory at large. Props -- a ladder, a dinghy, a family of chairs, a cap, a monkey dropped on a Parisian thoroughfare -- lend leverage, both graphic and psychological. That fabulations so thoroughly nuanced can come across as declarative throughout, so all-there at a glance, is a measure of Storer's commitment. Pose, the work invites us to think, amid the indignities of human self-awareness, is no soulless window dressing, but a wonder regained by turns.