After five years of painful wandering, Eugene painter Bobby DeVine has emerged from an artistic desert

BOBBY DeVINE is coming out of exile. The Eugene artist has been out of circulation, hiding out in the country and licking his wounds, since his last solo show here five years ago. In that time he's been through divorce - two of them, actually - and has gone through a spiritual process of winnowing down his life and art, seeking ways to translate the inner life into outward signs.

Now he's back, with new canvases ready to hang. "New Works From Oak Hill and Main Street," a selection of DeVine's oil paintings and pastels from the last five years, will open Friday in the Hult Center's Jacobs Gallery. DeVine's paintings, which he prefers to present in carefully arranged settings of as many as seven canvases, require careful reading. Many 20th century artists scorn narrative; DeVine embraces it, almost promiscuously, piling mythological reference onto visual allusion in a kind of cross-cultural stew. This works, at least more often than not. At its best, DeVine's work offers us a rich new take on art, religion and culture. At times, he may overreach, demanding too much integration from the viewer, producing effects that feel more intellectual than artistic. But always, his work has the feel of the genuine.

DeVine, who at 48 still has the look of a charming bad boy, lives and works in a small rented studio in a wooded setting off Crow Road west of Eugene. Furnished with the painful simplicity of the recently divorced, his home is a lofted space about the size of a two-car garage; it's packed full with his paintings, books, sketches and stacks of old copies of The New York Times. On the white wall where he paints, DeVine has scrawled a line from Bob Dylan (`She never stumbles, she has no place to fall') and another from Maya Angelou. Taped above his work table are fashion photos from Versace and Chanel magazine ads. Scattered on various tables are books: the Bible, a bestiary, some Robert Graves mythology, some Mircea Eliade comparative religion, a collection of paintings by Giotto.

DeVine's studio is a quiet, still place, one that lends itself to work, study and reflection. Out his back door, which leads to a rickety balcony, the artist can see trees, sky and his neighbor's goats and chickens. "Once I got out here I just loved it," he said. "It's just really quiet. I look out the door and see the storms coming in. That's the big event in my life."

That represents a big change from the studio space he used to share with photographer David Joyce on Springfield's Main Street. With its downtown noise and confusion, Springfield had begun to grind on him like the worst aspects of New York City, where DeVine started his artistic career at St. John's University three decades ago.

"You've been in David's studio," he said. "It's like being in Manhattan. I could hear the drunks and the prostitutes outside the door all night."

DeVine grew up Catholic on Long Island, the son of a funeral director and one of six children. Before graduating from college he fled the New York drug scene - "A lot of my friends were getting into smack," he said - and landed in Eugene in 1971. Here he's steadily made art and has helped found galleries such as the New Zone. He now supports himself, in a partnership with artist James Ulrich, painting houses - with paint from five-gallon buckets, not from two-ounce tubes. "People are always asking us to sign our work," he quipped.

He's also faced tragedy. One of DeVine's three daughters drowned in 1984, at the age of 8, leaving a hollow that's still felt today. DeVine's inner world is a yeasty mess of Catholicism, biblical Christianity, Eastern religion and philosophy. He grew up Catholic; by the time he reached Eugene he had started some 10 years of serious Bible study. Now he balances the Western tradition with studying the I Ching and reading ethnographic accounts of Mayan mushroom cults.

That may sound terribly postmodern and New Age, but it isn't; DeVine seems to have gotten to his personal promised land ahead of the multi-culti hucksters. "I still believe very strongly in Christ," he said. "That is the center of my spirituality. I am in that Kierkegaardian realm of working out my salvation in fear and trembling. But there is a lot of wisdom out there from other cultures."

Artistically as well, DeVine is both strongly centered and wildly ecumenical. Many of his paintings exploit the natural tension between color and line; a favorite effect is to present two versions of the same image in one painting, one in a pulsating line drawing, the other done in flat areas of color. He incorporates a lot of oppositions in his work, most obviously the use of harsh color complements: blue pulsates against orange, red against green. Thematically, though, anything is possible. He works in borrowed images, from Christ to Mary to Mayan figures to magazine advertisements. Animals frequently populate his paintings in the form of donkeys and birds. He draws heavily on the Renaissance, especially Giotto and Fra Angelico, two artists whose work he especially admires.

Understanding one of DeVine's paintings - especially his multiple painting sets - can be like reading a book. In one set of paintings, titled "The Fool's Ascent and Preponderance of the Small," a central panel shows the figure of Christ, ascending to Heaven, overlaid onto the figure of the Fool from the Tarot. After hanging and rehanging the painting, DeVine realized the panel works better with Christ upside down. Another panel, just below Christ and the Fool, is a falling figure from Mayan mushroom cults; a third, below that, shows Icarus, from the Greek myth, collapsed on the ground.

Arranged just so, the three panels show a single figure falling through various mythological incarnations. Taken together, the images constitute a reflection on pride and humility, DeVine explained as he hung all seven panels together on his studio wall, fussing all the while about their exact spacing.

Does this expect too much of the viewer? DeVine thinks not. "These days we are seeing images more like remote control television," he said. "Nanoseconds of images, like driving through a landscape or cityscape. That's the way you look at commercials.

"You are the one who reconstructs it. You are the one who gives that narrative its meaning. You have an innate need to construct that narrative, and you do."

Nov. 29, 1998