Eric Petersen: Images worth puzzling over

There is something intrinsically dark and mystical about punning. It's a form of verbal black magic that demonstrates how fluid and deceitful language can be while cloaking its wizardry with gentle humor. Eugene artist Eric Petersen is the king of puns, both verbal and visual. His new show at the White Lotus Gallery, "A Sheep at the Wheel," escorts us past the portals of pun hell to a slippery, childlike and darkly archetypal inner world where "Angel Food Cake" offers winged angels aflutter over a birthday cake, and "Bull Market" shows a matador in the bullring, inexplicably riding a bicycle towards an elephant.

(Why a bicycle? "Because he's tired," the artist says, and you take that answer at face value until the real answer sneaks up on you - "tired," he is "tired" with bike tires! Then you start to ask, as though you're now onto something: But what about the elephant?)

Petersen has been painting and making prints of such gaudily haunted images since the late 1970s. In that time he has attained a minor cult status around Eugene as an "outsider" artist; he lives with schizophrenia, which, he once said, neither explains nor informs his art any more than might a more pedestrian medical condition such as diabetes or the flu. His work has been in the Mayor's Art Show in Eugene five different times and won Best of Show there in 2000.

The artist creates his small universes from a regular cast of icons and symbols, employing animals such as elephants, turtles and crows alongside death's heads, skeletons, kings and jokers, clouds, candles and boats. In Petersen's world, sheep sometimes fly or even steer ships, as in "A Sheep at the Wheel," a small hand-colored etching from which the show draws its title. (Is the sheep, perhaps, asleep? Why does he look like he's been X-rayed through his fleece? Is he a sheep at all, or perhaps a wolf? What's with the dachshund on deck, and why does the fish have a birthday cake on top of its head? And why does the whole composition remind you of an American flag? This is what happens, the longer you look at Petersen's work.)

Petersen's drawing is flat and without perspective; his colors are bold; he uses a repetitive patterns; and his compositions are, in general, perfectly symmetrical. All these characteristics give his work its distinctive childlike quality, though I've never yet met a child who draws like this and, perhaps, hope I never do. Ultimately, the puns fall away as extraneous. Whatever sense they may first seem to make of his art is completely inadequate to explain its powerful effect, which is rooted somewhere between whimsy and myth. Stripped of their tongue-in-cheek titles, Petersen's paintings and etchings lose none of their fascination.

One large etching, "Supper Time for the Owl and the Pussycat," shows the two animals of the title standing side by side in a diptych. Over their heads scamper lines of mice and birds - supper, presumably. The cat stands in a circular enclosure surrounded by barbed wire; the owl perches on a hill. The whole thing feels like a religious icon dug up from some ancient, alien culture whose meaning we can never puzzle out.

And that is what makes his work worth going to see.

Nov. 21, 2004