Craig Spilman: Variations on a scheme

IN THE DRAWING and painting classes he teaches at Lane Community College, Craig Spilman likes to have his students create images in series. Take the picture you've just drawn and re-do it, darker. Now make it darker still. Now draw yet another one and push the background even deeper.

Not surprisingly, Spilman does the same thing with his own art, as you can see in a lean, clean show of his drawing and painting that's up for just one more week at the LCC art department gallery.

This little show basically consists of variations on two images. In the "Valley Series," about a dozen pieces making up the bulk of the exhibit, the artist takes a handful of simple, spare elements - a highway, the sky, a distant line of trees - and combines and recombines them into a set of variations that build on one another like parts of a fugue. Visually, these pictures are intricate studies in composition and design. The artist manipulates elements like a chess master moving pieces on the board. It's cool, intellectual work, as satisfying as an elegant puzzle.

Emotionally, though, they also pack a punch. The "Valley Series" is as lonely as Edward Hopper's cityscapes, with distant horizons overpowering the one human-made artifact we see - an empty road. The final variation in the "Valley Series" is the medium itself. Spilman creates similar images, in the same size, either as pencil drawings or as oil paintings on paper; the interplay between his silvery graphite drawings and the muted colors of his paintings makes you want to own these pictures in matched pairs.

On the other side of the gallery, five landscape drawings from the "Island Park Series" present a softer, less cerebral visual universe. Spilman is an excellent draftsman who combines great energy with precise control. These drawings suggest more detail than they actually contain, allowing him to speak loudly through understatement.

Nov. 8, 1998