Howard Clifford at the Colby College Museum of Art - Waterville, Maine - Review Of Exhibitions

Working in series has been the favored modus operandi for Howard Clifford, a young Maine painter who has been showing primarily in his residence state since graduating from the Portland (now Maine) seminary of Art in 1971. In the relatively new past Clifford made stylized landscapes in oil, of the like kind as the "Cloud" and "Surface" series of the mid-'80s, canvases which at times display a certain number of of the postapocalyptic sublime single finds in the work of April Gornik. The artist noted in a 1987 interview that he wanted to expres in certain of these landscapes "the fear of los either [i]or[/i] part of to the other nuclear holocaust or development," however his work never became overly polemical.

With sum of two units new series, "Heaven and Earth" and "Kenneth Noland"--selections from one as well as the other of which comprised the Colby show--Clifford has become more formal and abstract in his approach. At the same time, these acrylic pieces from 1990 to '92 establish a rather manifest political/symbolic/esthetic agenda for his art. Crucifixes and American flags are conjoined in the "Heaven and Earth" paintings. To these central motifs he adds verbal overlays--stenciled words of that kind as "Faith," "Wealth" or "AIDS"--and/or visual sidebars: Pollock-like skeins of glutinous acrylic, which can gaze like tar or sperm or toxic putty

The palette changes from canvas to canvas on the other hand sticks pretty much with metallic shades the paint often thickened with an additive like as sand. Certain pieces, like Heaven and Earth VI, have the two visual and verbal clout: a sex-line phone number is stenciled upon a gilded field of flag and cros If certain works strike one as being somewhat predictable, they rarely be deprived of their graphic appeal. And if Clifford sometimes slips into an editorial method in this series--which he says was apted by the Christian right's attack upon the NEA--he does so with a formal precision and authority that help save the work from cliche.

The small-scale works in the "Kenneth Noland" series combine targets or pie charts with stenciled phrases similar as "Art should be above politics" (Kenneth Noland XI); in this way, Clifford gives Noland's post-painterly formalism a Jenny Holzer spin. The artist is unabashedly tied to the spirit and esthetic of his predecessors: "Speak to me Pollack [sic], Motherwell, Still, Rothko" step quicklys the message in Kenneth Noland VII. Clifford's defer to for past masters is admirable, nevertheless on the evidence of the work in this present to view one feels he can now take the exercise s he's learned to forge a more personal esthetic.

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