No Sloane Down: At age 83, artist still works in multiple mediums

Thursday, July 22, 2004 | 8:13 a.m.

Seated before a small crowd that bore a striking similarity to her artwork - mostly women wearing bright colors and patterns - Phyllis Sloane politely fielded questions about her technique and her inspiration.

At 83, she has spent six decades working in multiple mediums. Her paintings and prints are clean and devoid of detail, a resolute influence from her early years studying graphics and packaging design. Her portraits tell stories.

But ask Sloane about subject matter and meaning of the work in her retrospective exhibit at the Las Vegas Art Museum, and you're left to believe that the results were purely incidental, a reflection of her whims and immediate resources.

Sloane's paintings and silk-screens of women (wistful, meditative, pensive and posed) are not so much about exploring the beauty and complexity of women, she said, but a matter of circumstance - gender roles in society.

"We had these sketch groups," she said. "We always had women models because the men were always working."

A series of works that pay homage to well-known artists include a torn painting of artist Vincent Van Gogh. When asked about this, Sloane smiled and explained, "It was the end of the series, he was very destructive so I thought I'd just tear it up."

Her prints?

"You never know what you're going to get until you print it," Sloane said. "There's such an element of surprise in print making."

But it all comes together perfectly, and you are drawn into the desolate neighborhoods and rooftops or imagining the story behind the woman having coffee, sitting in a chair, lying on a couch, dressing or in the company of another.

Her still lifes, which at first appear to be scattered haphazardly with collected objects, are in fact very carefully spaced and planned out.

"There is an appearance of randomness," said James Mann, curator at large for the museum, who is responsible for bringing in the collection from Sloane's studio in Sante Fe, N.M. "They're deceptively complicated. You look at them and say Tthis is arbitrary,' but for some reason you keep on looking and there is some harmony." The exhibit, on display through Sept. 19, features nearly 200 paintings, etchings, heat transfers, prints and aquatints that demonstrate Sloane's versatility and tenacity in a journey of patterns, shapes and colors.

There is a large abstract oil on canvas from 1955, dozens of still lifes, a colorful series of women both in silk-screen and acrylic on canvas that she created in the 1970s, female nudes and her landscapes.

Regarding buildings and city scenes, Sloane said, "It was a mood that reached me. It was like discovering a whole new world for me, like the way I felt when I went to Sante Fe and saw the landscapes ... I just became fascinated with it. After that I just started going to parking garages. I liked the fact that they were abandoned. "My apartment in Cleveland on the twelfth floor was always looking down at houses. There was one that always had a light on in a doorway. I looked at it for a couple of years, then one night I thought, 'Those shadows are really interesting.' " Surrounded by the nearly 200 paintings in the retrospective exhibit, Sloane says she feels like she's among "old friends."

Mann brought everything he could and deliberately scrambled the chronology and medium.

"I met Phyllis in Sante Fe about five years ago," Mann told the group of 60 (mostly docents) who turned out for Sloane's Saturday lecture. "I made a tentative appointment, which I broke and felt guilty about."

"This is how he made it up," Sloane interjected.

Sloane was born in 1921 in Worchester, Mass. She grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and won a poster contest when she was in the third grade.

Twenty-two years later she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, which was then Carnegie Tech, with a bachelor of fine arts degree in industrial design.

While at school, she loved painting, but needed the practicality of graphic design to make a living, so she studied both.

After a stint working for Sears Roebuck, which was uninspired by lack of productivity during World War II, she retired from packaging design in 1949, but continued as an artist.

In 1959 she acquired her first printing press. Her work in prints range from linoleum to cork cuts, silk screens and experimental projects. Her design background influences her today.

"What excites me most is the breaking up of the space," Sloan esaid.

Industrious, she credits her father for her work ethic and creativity. She still works in various mediums today in her Sante Fe studio, where she's inspired by Japanese printmaking and artists David Hockney, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers. She's had several solo shows in Cleveland and in Santa Fe.

"I just find working a necessity in my life," Sloane said. "It's a compulsion. I need it. I enjoy it. If I go too long without painting it feels like I'm forgetting to brush my teeth."