Regehr’s clotted colors ooze rich imagery
Visual Art - Times Colonist - By Robert Amos - Saturday March 8,1997
What about Duncan Regehr? I admire this artist, but I don’t really connect with his work.
Regehr’s very accomplished paintings are on show at Winchester Gallery until March 20. Brightly colored, dense with meaning, they provide much to admire.
Every line of inquiry about him yields heaps of information. From his lavishly illustrated biography The Dragons’ Eye: An Artist’s View (Journey Editions, Boston, 1974) we learn that he was raised in Victoria, the child of a Russian Mennonite immigrant father.
In 1969 he was plucked from teenage anonymity by Dr. Ralph Allen of the Victoria Fair Theatre Company and set on the road to a lifetime career as an actor. In a whirlwind of youth (and, one presumes, sex and drugs) Regehr in 1974 made his way to Stratford, Ontario and its famous Shakespearean theatre.
By that time he was already functioning as an artist, a poet, and an actor. His subject was – and remains – people, and their inner worlds. At this stage his precocious pictures owed much to Peter Max and the film, Yellow Submarine.
His career took him to California
where he starred in made-for-T.V. movies, notably as Errol Flynn in My
Wicked, Wicked Ways in 1985 and the title role in the TV series Zorro in
1993. As an artist, he created series of paintings inspired by standing stones
in Britain, minimalist geological landscapes and the inner life of Los Angeles.
Since then Regehr and his wife have made Washington State their
home, between film gigs. And he has developed his most extensive series of
paintings under the title Poetic Imagery.
Here’s how it works:
“As a small boy I found faces and monsters in the textures cement walls of my basement niche. Today, I see elusive formations in everything,” the artist explains. He creates heavily textured boards to paint on, and as he layers the colors, the images come to him.
“The resulting illustrations took the form of symbolic portraits. By subconscious osmosis, the work would often align itself with the abstract ramblings of my journal writings and poetry, incorporating faces known and unknown; tapping into my dreams and bringing forth forgotten memories.”
“Most paintings of Poetic Imagery simply arrive. There is no search for subject matter. The images happen rather than manifest by direct intent. The more I let go of control, the more readily images present themselves.”
“Taking in one of these images is like eating toffee, slow going and very rich. Beyond that textured ground, glazed layers of colors fit edge to edge like stained glass, almost toxic in their intensity.
The figures are well-drawn but wide-eyed, and each character seem lost in a daze. These pictures are clotted with imagery. A monkey in a feathered and jewelled turban leans to tweak the nipple of a nude who rebuffs him with a vertical palm. Long-nosed masks, head dresses overwhelmed with flowers, incandescent sunsets...everything seems to have a symbolic meaning.
Here’s Regehr the poet:
It wept from a leak in his skull
Red dapple and royal purple
Descended under the flesh
As patient as creeping lava
He never played
Except Mahler for the flowers,
Precisely and alone...
Regehr’s enclosed hot-house environment calls to my mind the art of Gustave Moreau, which we call Symbolist, and the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, “the decadent.”
I salute Regehr for his skill in creating these paintings. His draughtsmanship is admirable, his access to the subconscious profound and sincere. Yet, gazing at these panels, I just don’t connect. Maybe you will.
A picture of “The Apothecary Jar” appeared in this article with the caption,
”Duncan Regehr’s pictures are as rich in symbolism as they are in dense coloration.”