View from the Groves as Grice Gallery reopens

Published 9:00 am Saturday, October 9, 2004

Mixed-media drawings are crafted of layered colors, materials.

It’s been a year and a half since Anthea Groves’ last solo show, and this artist has spent the intervening months becoming even more fluent in the visual language that is her own.

“I got a lot of momentum from the last show,” Groves said. “My grasp on my ideas is better than I’ve ever had, and that’s the way it should be. I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on my work.”

The 4-by-6-inch mixed media drawings for the October show that reopens the Art Grice Gallery are layered with gesso, watercolor crayon, graphite and wood glue on sheets torn from old paperbacks. They feature organic shapes – most often ovoid, seed-pod-like forms on “stalks.”

Groves lays on the graphite with a sure hand; the printed words float under the image, obscured in places, allowed to surface in others. The sepia tone of the aging paper is appealing and invests the images with a certain nostalgia.

Groves works on many drawings at once, she says.

Her small Winslow apartment is also her studio, and drawings, numbering in the thousands, are everywhere. She works many at one time, reworking until they feel right.

“They’re never really done,” she said. “They stay alive. You can keep going on them. I don’t feel like it’s a precious thing and I have to keep it. That’s what great about drawing, it’s always a work in progress.”

These are worldly little drawings, in a quiet way. Groves studied at cosmopolitan San Francisco Art Institute and spent several years in New York City, and the exposure shows in the work.

But because she is essentially an “inner-directed” rather than an “outer-directed” artist, the influences do not overwhelm but rather sharpen the imagery.

Groves has shown in Puget Sound venues including Bellevue Civic Center, Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, Center on Contemporary Art, RAW Gallery; and has had several shows hung in San Francisco cafés.

But one longs for this artist to make the work available to a wider audience. The beautiful, sensitive drawings could be at home in a 57th Street gallery.

It’s a sometimes-frustrating artworld truism that talent and business acumen don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

In fact, it can sometimes seem that the artists who might benefit from a little more studio time are out there hustling, while some more genuine talents are reticent.

But Groves says it’s not shyness but the focus on her work that sometimes gets in the way of pushing the drawings out into the world.

“It’s not a confidence thing with me,” Groves said. “I draw constantly, and I don’t like most of the stuff I draw. I realize you have to draw a lot to get something that makes you happy and that’s the goal. It’s creating your own system of learning.”

Whether she goes on to have a big career or elects to stay closer to home, she may have already won the game; Groves has a firm grip on the only sure reward any artist can count on – the complex pleasure of making work.

“You’re out in the world collecting things for your eyes and your ears all the time, but when you get home and it’s quiet, you can play with all the things in your head,” she said. “Hours fly by and that’s an amazing feeling. I asked myself, would you still do these if no one looked at it, and I said yes, because it’s so much fun.”

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Art Grice Studio/Gallery presents recent drawings by Anthea Groves, Oct 10 to Nov. 6, with a reception from 2-6 p.m. Oct. 10.

The show marks the re-opening of the alternative art gallery, first opened in March 2003. Converting his Island Center barn to a gallery had been a longtime dream for photographer Grice; artist friends Sally Prangley Rooney, Gary Groves and Don Kowalski collaborated to refurbish the space. After a season of varied works, the gallery “lay fallow” while Grice and Rooney worked on other projects.

The gallery is at 7869 Fletcher Bay Road (four driveways south of High School Road on the right). Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, or by appointment.

For more information, call 842-1294 or 842-7154.