Carmen Lomas Garza: Artist of Wonder, Enigma and Truth

Carmen Lomas Garza: Artist of Wonder, Enigma And Truth

By Victor Martinez

Carmen Lomas Garza’s figures have always invited speculation. Scrupulously drawn, etched with a crisp precision, they are shown doing everything from fishing, playing, tilling soil, cake walking, to hosing fire and slaughtering a chicken. Her scenes often conjure the naïve and innocent simplicity of childhood memories, with members of her family as well as herself in prominent roles.

What separates her work from the sincere nostalgia of a naïve or folk art tradition, however, is the peculiar and distinctive quality of her scenes. One views a drawing, lithograph, gouache or acrylic painting by her with a sense of wonder. At times the simplest gouache can acquire an almost sacramental aura. The reasons for this are complex and varied, but when looking at the dollish, doughy-brown figures, one notices the subtle strain of unmeshed accommodation they have with their surroundings. They appear broadly out-lined, standing almost in relief against a flattened plane, and yet seem pressed or pasted onto the scene. The faces, too, invite reflection, and are often shown with little or no expression. They appear, if not in a repose or reverie, then buried inside their own private introspections.

Other notable incongruities appear. The hands, for example, rarely link or grip in such a way as to suggest the tensing of a nerve, sinew or ligament. One may of course attribute the reserved facial expressions and delineation of the hands to the vague or absent outline of a naïve style, but in artpiece after artpiece, whether describing a historical epoch, or a simple scene of a family having dinner, the pictorial reservations are crucial. The expression of the face and the activity of the hands locate and ground a figure to its surrounding, stitch it to a specific moment. Her figures, instead, appear occupied in thoughts beyond what they are doing, as if they are more than what they do, as if their appearance doesn’t tell the entire story.

All this engages the viewer, like a secret message, a riddle, or puzzle beckoning to be deciphered. Because of the enigmatic poses of the figures, and the visual disonnances of their expressions, the viewer often asks the question, What is going on in this scene? To attempt an answer, the viewer must look at the artpiece as a whole. The figures, for example, are never shown as large or imposing, nor clustered together in compact crowds. The accumulations of all the acts of every character is what creates the space for an event to occur. That is why they are spaced contemplatively throughout the frame, as if attached by an invisible vinculum. The results of the viewer contemplating the composition is that once must reflect, as well, upon what has occurred, and what will occur. And this is important, in that many of the works are in fact the delineating space between what has happened before and what has happened after. Let me give a brief illustration of this question of before and after. In a painting done in 1984, called, Native-Americans, Lomas Garza shows a small tribe of Miwok Indians in what is now Yosemite Valley. It is part of a series of eight paintings entitled, History of Northern California Water. To the left of the painting is a bark-slat shelter surrounded by winnowing, serving, sifting and cooking baskets. In the foreground is a granary on stilts. A woman to the left of the granary is grinding acorns with pestle and mortar, while a young boy and woman cook the ground and leach acorn meal.

Simply put, this painting portrays native life before the arrival of the Spaniard around 1760 as it is imagined by the artist. The area we now call California was once forests, lakes and marshes. Life depended on water and, barring the relativity of drought, all animal life had equal access to it. Native-Americans offers a numenic insight into a people whose lives were a series of seasonal treks from one bio-region to another. Being animistic, their vision of the natural world contained a keenly spiritual and physically palpable sense of its immediacy. The intent of the painting is not to romanticize early natives as uncorrupted, however. The baskets, stone grinder and storage container are all evidence of a technology used to exploit the natural world. Native-Americans is important, rather, because it shows the possibility for humans to live within and among the natural world, not beside or against it. The animistic belief that water is a living entity and spirit, however, we erased with the advent of the European. Print space prohibits me from speaking more in detail, but suffice to say that the seven succeeding paintings of the series chronicle how water was channeled and confined, used as an item for sale, for irrigation, for fire suppression. Water became a product. The final painting is a supreme illustration of the result of modern California’s imprisonment of water. It is the “after” of all proceeding paintings.

Patterned after a diagram, Map of Water Route, shows an abstract of the three primary reservoirs and adjacent dams of the Hetch Hetchy water and power system. The system utilizes gravity as its proponent force and flows water 148 miles through a spectacular series of tunnels, pipelines, inverted siphons and electricity supplying powerhouses. One can’t view this painting without marveling at the engineering genius involved in such a colossal undertaking. The only organic imagery in the painting are two visual captions. They offer peaks into the sober workings of technocrats, who appear rigid and mentally abstracted. In contrast to the natives in the first paintings, who are revealed in all manner of kinetic activity crouching, playing, pulling, carrying, they are not accommodating themselves to their environment, but utilizing it.

As a whole, the eight paintings of the series suggest a harmony of smoothly flowing historical events. Individually, however, one can almost hear the hiss of cultural friction issuing from each canvas. A simple comparing and contrasting reveals much, especially in the painting Mission Dolores, where ironically, early California natives are shown building the church that would serve as the place of their physical and spiritual confinement. Here again, as in other of Lomas Garza’s works, what is critical overshadows the surface, opening up its ambiguity and airing it to analysis. Taken as a whole, these paintings are weapons of scholarship. Between the first painting, Native Americans, so starkly physical, and the last painting, Map of water route, so graphically abstract, a space of meaning has been created which describes the history of Western civilization as a self-justifying fraud. On the surface, it shows a selective charting of the linear advance of progress, while underneath, one sees how genocide and assimilation become adjuncts to that progress.

The intent of the series, however, is not to inflict moral onslaughts, although the paintings do serve as a powerful impulse towards justice. Rather the paintings show what has lead to the present crisis, the rift between humans and the physical world. What one sees are two distinct ways of viewing water; as an entity, and as a resource. We no longer live in the animist’s world of the first painting, and to desire to return to that time is, of course, an anachronism. However, to accept the time of the final, eight painting, is to choose to remain in our present, technology-driven course, which means continued rupture, depletion, a wish for both a spiritual and physical extinction.

Again, as in all of Carmen Lomas Garza’s artwork, underneath the surface lies a weightier significance. Her works are not entirely about history, about distances in time and events, or the significance and endless puzzle that is the human subject. They are about engaging the viewer, again and again, in a search for a potential synthesis. In the series described so briefly above, it is to find a reconciliation between indigenous native cultures and technological citizens; it is to close the distance between reverence for nature and technological expertise. To achieve such a synthesis would of course amount to nothing less than a total reevaluation of our values as a civilization… but again, as a viewer, one must question, again, one must seek answers. It is only by doing this do Carmen Lomas Garza’s paintings make sense to us.