At first glance Sam Faix’s paintings in his fifth solo show at Nahcotta seem to fit with a light-hearted summertime mood, captured perhaps at a home by the sea. Red carpets and bright yellow chairs spring from the cool blues and grays of his collaged paper and acrylic or oil canvases. But at heart these scenes portray a more serious, difficult place where a lost domestic innocence plays quietly among the familiar objects.
Faix constructs the scenes in the paintings from memories of his childhood home. After recently losing both of his parents, he and his siblings faced the daunting task of cleaning the old house in order to sell it. As they worked, he realized the furniture and objects created “moments” in the house that were about to disappear from their lives. Through these paintings, he used memories and objects to build up the scenes of his childhood into what he terms “variously and alternately reconstructions, apologies, memories, and pivots that chart both the inner and the literal landscapes of all these changes and events.”
As the show’s title, “Sam Faix: A Year in Pictures” suggests, he’s melded his still-lifes and interiors into emotional self-portraits. A cartoonish version of Faix (boyish, with shocking blond hair) overtly stars in the drama of “Summer Day” and “Couchridden.” In other paintings, the empty kitchen chair, or the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, suggests the tactile presence of an absent body, inviting the viewer to feel the place, or to sit in the kitchen and the family room that seem so familiar.
Starting a canvas with a given composition in mind challenged Faix’s usual stance toward painting. Typically the subject matter is less significant to his process than his effort to create a good painting from a strictly formal perspective. “In this series,” he says, “I was more consciously aware of building these interiors. That’s quite a departure from how I normally work.”
When working with oil on panel, Faix uses thick opaque strokes and daubs of color. In his acrylic works, he delivers something more intriguing—a dream-like layering of imagery built up through pencil strokes, pieces of colored paper, and patches of paint on the canvas. In “Bowl of Daisies” a woman stands in reverie amidst a patchwork of kitchen furniture, cabinetry and objects. To the right of her the floor of the sunny kitchen rises sharply in a receding U-shape, while the stove and refrigerator collapse into the foreground just to her left. Faix deftly uses his pencil to define spatial relationships and pull the subject matter forward from the wrinkles of paper and swatches of color that form the base of the painting. On the far left of the panel, there’s a glimpse into the living room beyond, a dark room that matches the brooding tone of the woman with her back to the bowl of bright daisies. Her blurred figure has been drawn, then painted over and drawn again.
A few small works on paper emphasize this additive process, resulting in beautiful abstract studies of paint, texture and line. The roughness of the paint and collage supports the weight of the pencil that soon submerges beneath a veil of white. In the works on paper, the process of painting and drawing in tandem that feeds the development of the larger acrylic works becomes intensely immediate. By not starting a composition with a single deterministic sketch, Faix privileges his predilection toward abstraction while still allowing for recognizable figures and spaces to enter into the work later on. He says he relies on the pencil to “make a big move or clarify things as I’m working.” Faix might finish a painting where others would begin, with a few quick defining lines, and allow the objects to stand forth in the final product through the minimal device of the outline.
In “Evacuation,” he bridges his more planned interior compositions with the free association typical of his earlier works. A self-portrait of the artist sitting before some flowers occupies the lower half of the large oil panel. As if a painting were hanging on a wall beside him, the upper portion shows us a somber, abstract psychological portrait. The subject matter, Faix explains, transformed through two or three stages as he worked on the painting, allowing different sources in his life to feed into the work. Likewise in “Couchridden,” a colorful mix of strange object-like abstractions blankets the somber figure of the artist reclining in a room that fades across the canvas from realistic space to flatness and abstract pastiche.
It is surprising that the first impression of Faix’s domestic scenes is so comforting when in fact they grew out of a difficult year of loss and transformation in his life. Upon closer inspection, he has imbued each painting with its unique stamp of complex emotions, while alternating between slightly disquieting interiors and chaotic still-lifes with freshness and vitality. They are all intensely personal, closely framed “moments” that Faix bravely delivers to the public.
“Sam Faix: A Year in Pictures” will be at Nahcotta, 110 Congress St., Portsmouth (603-433-1705) through Aug. 7.