Kathleen Caprario and James Ulrich make a moving show together

A poignant art exhibit just wrapping up this week at the Lane Community College Art Department shows the common ground between two Springfield artists who otherwise are as different as any other husband and wife might be. And, in a bizarre turn of events, three paintings were stolen from the show on Feb. 13. They hadn't been recovered, despite a reward offered by LCC.

"Presence:Absence," as the exhibit is called, brings together in the same gallery Kathleen Caprario drawings and James Ulrich paintings, her landscapes and his people. Her works are often monochromatic; his colors are bold. Caprario's work is cool and detached. Ulrich's is personal, emotional, sometimes painful to look at.

But Ulrich and Caprario's art has this in common: Both describe a mythic place in their work, a world where dreams and nightmares converge well away from everyday reality. Caprario, who teaches art at LCC, creates intense, clean little landscapes in graphite on paper, which she sets off with ornate surrounds of metal leaf. Her pictures are rhapsodic but cool, like black and white photographs sent back from another dimension by some escaped NASA space probe.

In her drawings, well known around Eugene for years, rocks might dot an eerie seashore. Clouds gather along a cliff. They're not exactly science fiction or fantasy. The metallic surrounds lend a religious aura, the look of Orthodox icons, perhaps, giving her images a sense of detached reverence. Ulrich's work is far more personal, tragic and unsettling, sometimes amounting to an uncomfortably bitter cry. In the LCC exhibit is his series of pastel and oil paintings of fools. The images depict a solitary seeker in a devastated world, his way lit by a faltering candle. Sometimes wearing a dunce cap, Ulrich's fool doesn't stand a chance. It's perhaps a tribute to their power that three of these paintings were stolen from the gallery.

One large work, "Journey," shows Ulrich's fool in a cave, a red demon literally strapped to his back. The fool holds a walking stick in one hand, the ever-present candle in the other. His face is upturned to the light that comes from a distant entrance to the world above, but the demon is pulling him downward to darkness below.

The most hopeful of Ulrich's images, "Fool's Arrival," shows him on a lonely shore, cradling a flower. This was one of the stolen paintings. A boat departs in the distance. Ulrich's work, artistically a little rough-hewn, is full of this kind of narrative.

By contrast, Caprario's drawings are more subtle and in some ways even more unsettling. Her finely wrought images - the craftsmanship is exquisite - represent a dreamscape that is superficially more placid and yet oddly threatening to view. Her landscapes seem not just empty but depopulated, as though we're looking through little windows at scenes of the apocalypse. The soft yet severe little graphite landscapes are contained by the colorful warmth of her metal surrounds, which give the images inside an even greater emotional distance.

The key to the poignancy of the show is Ulrich's self portrait. In place of the fool's candle, the Jim Ulrich in the painting - a bearded, thoughtful young man - holds a single match high, illuminating the darkness around him. In his other hand, he holds a book containing more matches, a finite supply of faltering light.

Ulrich's light ran out on Oct. 31, 2001. Suffering from chronic and severe depression, he killed himself. He was 51 years old. Thrown for months off her usual artistic course, Caprario has taken up painting again, recently adding color to her work somewhat in the manner of her late husband. This show is a brave move on her part. She could not have been faulted had she kept her art and career more publicly separate from personal tragedy. And the show is also a challenge for us, demanding us as viewers to peer into these images and reflect on the powerful and strange connections between art and life.

Feb. 22, 2004