Figurative and Imagistic

Though of different generations, Alden Mason (b.1919) and Andrew Keating (b.1948) interestingly parallel each other. Thanks to scheduling, I got a pre-installation view of the 20-year retrospective of Mason's drawings at the Seattle Art Museum pavilion just a few days after seeing Keating's show of new paintings and gouaches at the Linda Farris Gallery; and the next day I found the two in tandem in a show called "Heads" at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham.

Mason centers his pictures on freewheeling interpretations of human heads. So does Keating - or at least he did until the last year or so. Both take the head to be, as Keating says, " a paradigm for the human being and spirit," although Mason's images are portraits with the parts more or less in the right places and Keating's are generalized (they are often referred to as "clones") with features multiplied and displaced. Mason uses brushes in drawings and then with chopsticks - a tool he picked up from John Altoon, as well as a gleeful and indefinite eroticism. For paintings, Mason uses plastic squeeze bottles loaded with acrylics to make compressed squiggles like those in Huichol designs. Keating's pictures take many forms - from conventional supports to plywood cutouts, color Xerox collages, and reliefs.

Clearly a leader among the fantasists dealing with generic human imagery, Keating in more interested than others in "the biological factor ... and social implications of genetic engineering and spare-parts surgery." That Keating's new work came as a shock to those who had followed his career over the last decade was puzzling to an outsider. True, a new somberness - a ponderous quality, even - was disclosed, but it isn't as if the dashing wit of his earlier pictures gainsaid what Keating termed their "Promethian implications." Instead of splayed features or besieged glyphs, Keating showed in February the somewhat clunky postures of a fleshed-out, full length progeny (the issue, genetically regrouped, of his previous "Mom & Pop" cutouts). His figures stand, their suspicious little eyes taking sidelong fixes, before homogenized hills in twisty balled-up weather that forecasts some major deluge. (The hills, as Regina Hackett observed, are out of Grant Wood.) Keating seems to be saying that any identity is of dubious origin and up against a blank fate.