Friday, October 24, 2008

Tip Toland's extraordinarily serene "Milk for the Butter Thief," shown in a close-up detail.
At BAM, Tip Toland's stoneware figures celebrate the inner spirit
By REGINA HACKETT
P-I ART CRITIC

Tip Toland's life-sized, stoneware figures carry their weight lightly. None of her stunted children, naked elderly or solitary middle-aged is bogged down by class, oddity or circumstance.

ART REVIEW
TIP TOLAND

WHERE: Bellevue Arts Museum, 510 Bellevue Way N.E.

WHEN: Toland through Feb. 8, Ichikawa through March 8, Shull through Jan. 11. 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Saturday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays, 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sunday.

ADMISSION: $9 general, $7 seniors/students, children under 6 free, free first Friday each month; free parking
In lesser hands, they'd be freaks. In hers, they are transformed by material evidence of inner light. Her influences extend to the Northern High Renaissance, particularly painter Matthias Grunewald's spirit-struck, gargoylish crowd scenes.

A contemporary Northern expressionist such as Odd Nerdrum means less to her. Nerdrum's figures are sunk in sepia-toned gloom. Like Grunewald's, Toland's are distinct and their distortions earned by their character.

"Tip Toland: Melt, the Figure in Clay" at the Bellevue Arts Museum is a small exhibit with a haunting resonance. Its achievement is a long time coming. A tired kind of Surrealism bogged down her earlier work. Although her skill was never in doubt, skill for its own sake, wrote poet Charles Wright, is like the spider's web without the spider: "It can catch, but it cannot kill."

Her new work kills.

Blue veins run faintly under the skin of the sleeping woman in "Milk for the Butter Thief." The model is a friend who was willing to take her off clothes and fall asleep as the artist studied her. With eyes closed, the old woman is awake in the world of the spirit.

The ambiguous sexual status of Grace in "Grace Flirts" is meticulously detailed. Wearing a saggy yellow swimsuit and fake Halloween lips, she kids around with the discomfort her existence elicits in others.

In "Middlemarch," George Eliot wrote about the burden of heightened awareness: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

Toland makes art on the other side of silence, rooted in the real but mystically madcap, a celebration of the childhood game in which "all the outs are in free."