Art: Review: Pat Steir: Paintings and Prints

Pat Steir Studio Pat Steir's "Potentially Pat's Living Room"

Pat Steir doesn't like to talk about her work. Why should she? She's a visuals person, not a words person. Her work communicates without a wealth of explanation.

When we talked just before her current Cincinnati show opened, she sidestepped questions and referred me to Pat Steir Paintings, a new book by Doris von Drathen that includes the author's long interview with her. The two flounder a bit trying to pin down what it is she does and why. "Meaning," however, seems to me less important than the immediate and deepening pleasure of being in the company of these works.

Steir's paintings and prints are unabashedly beautiful, and anyone with half an eye can recognize they are also immensely skillful. Chance plays a role — how could it not when you're pouring and dripping paint? — but she says she always finishes a piece even if it seems to be going wrong.

"Then I put it away," she said, "but sometimes those turn out to be the best ones after all."

Pat Steir: Paintings and Prints at Carl Solway Gallery is thoughtfully arranged, beginning with a corridor hung with the artist's tour-de-force prints. She switches from one technique to another with gleeful ease; waterfalls are a recurring motif. Surface is as important here as in her paintings, hence the usefulness of chine collé, for instance, in "Blue Moon Waterfall," in which a thin tissue is pasted onto a heavier, previously printed surface to provide a filigree of red spatters.

The prints vary in size, from a modest 19.5-inch square to several that are 48 or even 57 inches high. The smallest, "July 14th, 8 pm" uses etching, aquatint, whiteground, soft ground and pochoir (the latter a stencil technique much used in the 1920s and not much since) for a joyous reflection of fireworks on France's Bastille Day. One of the largest is "Waterfall #8," a very handsome hand-painted monoprint set off by a black background.

The paintings are grouped in two sections, one all shimmer and delight, the other variations on the waterfalls that continue to bemuse the artist. Three of these, all made in the last year via white paint poured and dripped on a black ground, can be read as a series. In the first, "Florida Waterfall Three Marks," Steir's basic waterfall image appears. In "New Graphic White Waterfall with One Black Stroke" that shape is joined by a new configuration. The third, titled "Potentially Pat's Living Room," merges the two in a larger, almost square canvas (84 by 81 inches) with a marvelously complex rendering. "I meant this for my own living room," she told me, laughing. "Now Carl has it."

The largest painting in the exhibition, "Moon Beam" (2005), seems to have its own aura drawing the viewer in, although its silvery surface is difficult to light without reflection, a problem not solved here. A work called "Green Mist" (2007) has tender colors set off by rough splashes of creamy white, while "Totally Silver with Pink Waterfall" (1989) has in places an almost knotty surface, its upper edge splashed from below. "It shows my reach," Steir said. "The extent my hand can go."

That's interesting to know but not vital. Pat Steir doesn't need to talk about her work. It speaks for itself.

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