"Blue Granados" Oil on canvas, 36 x 36, 2007.

Every painting is a balancing act performed on the monkey bars of color and composition. And equally, each is assembled, puzzle-like, from bits and pieces of an artist's life. In Harriet Moore Ballard's complex, richly layered, ultimately mysterious paintings, the events of a life and the actions of painting float together, as if on or just below the surface of a clear stream. Her barely outlined pictorial elements are like objects glimpsed in a room at twilight, just as the shadows of things mix with intimations of transcendent form.

At various times in her life Ballard has lived for extended periods in Istanbul and London, and these days divides each year between Cleveland and the Mexican arts mecca of San Miguel de Allende. Hints of all these places merge on her brightly moody surfaces. The influence of the great British artist Ben Nicholson, whose work she encountered long ago during a seven-year stint in England, has been especially important to the development of Ballard's own vocabulary. Early in his career Nicholson's paintings reflected an interest in British folk art and motifs. Later he was introduced to the abstraction-creation movement of the early 1930s. Eventually, dynamically layered rectangles evolved into more expressive, personality-laden images, impacting other British painters of the 1940s and 1950s, notably Francis Bacon. Both of these tendencies are still legible in Ballard's work, where simple line drawings of natural and manmade objects, sometimes accompanied by handwritten words or phrases, are blended into a system of semi-transparent passages, like the reflections of windows against a wall. But Nicholson is only one of the starting points of Ballard's explorations. Hints of Georges Braques, Henri Matisse and the dimensional conceits of synthetic cubism are sometimes visible along with a general concern for modernist values, especially the expression of aesthetic space as a marker for the passage of time; in such works art becomes a kind of clock.

In Ballard's show at Bonfoey's, titled Order and Chaos, the ticking of this kind of subjective time is almost audible. The 20 paintings and collages on view include a little bit of many things, from grid-like passages that resemble checkerboards in aquamarine and magenta - or apple green and pink, or dark blue and brown - to the sudden loose geometric form unfolding out of nothingness in the center of the painting titled "Caldera" like a jack-in-the-box. There are views that have the bright sun and deep shade of a Mexican afternoon as gourd-like shapes linger along the margins of an eternal present.

"caldera" Mixed media on unstretched canvas, 2007.

The painting "Kopjes," on the other hand, takes its title from outcroppings of granite and gneiss that occur an ocean away from the Americas on the Serengeti Plains. Technically known as inselbergs, Ballard saw these cracked, immemorially ancient fortresses of volcanic rock on a recent trip to Africa, each a mini-ecosystem with its own flora and extraordinary fauna. Rather than rendering such a scene, Ballard uses the idea of isolated areas of extraordinary composition rising into view at intervals as a metaphor for her own approach to material and imagery. Ballard seems to jump from color to color, image to image, as she slowly constructs a fragile passage to the true homeland of her own varied experience. She proposes and erases, balances, juggles and adjusts in works that are always full of movement. Some rush upward toward a corner, others achieve a state of vibrating poise, stopped for a moment on the verge of disintegration.

The mixed-media work on unstretched canvas titled "Caldera" may be Ballard's riskiest work to date. About 6 feet tall, the relatively monochromatic drawing involves collage and transparent sheets of plastic, as well as many intricate passages of ink wash. Circles and words, well-worn stains and sinuous lines generate a sense of time, of rains and marks of traveling separated by dry centuries. It's a portrait of Ballard's African experience, something like the images of the primordial rock paintings also located in the Serengeti, at once familiar and indecipherable. The title itself alludes to the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania, which is the caldera (Spanish "cauldron") of an ancient volcano, the largest formation of its kind in the world.
While Ballard's rich, almost chaotic mix of images, words and textures could be seen collectively as a sort of caldera or aftermath of internal activity, the overall tone of her recent paintings is cool. This is true, I think, not only of their tonal temperature, consisting often of dominant blues and greens, but also of their temperament, which seems if anything refreshingly serene. The order that Ballard strives to bring to the fragmentary nature of perception is one that partakes of the joys of the earth, expressing a deep satisfaction with the beauty of life as she resolves and tames the tensions she discovers.
"Blue Granados," for instance, is simply, unabashedly lovely. This is all the more impressive since it is not at all a simple painting in terms either of its internal organization or the visual dissonance of dark umbers and deep blues that Ballard chooses as the dominant notes of the piece. As an image, "Blue Granados" is intensely musical, referring (I think) to early 20th century Spanish composer Enrique Granados' signature piano suite Goyescas, with its sweeping, dark passages. Among Ballard's usually colorful paintings, this work is a blue period all its own, daring to overtly emulate Braque, Matisse, Gris and, of course, Picasso, as it goes about its own business of solving the dilemma of blue vs. brown. A vase of flowers tilts up to the right, a splash of orange nestles like a captive sunrise just in the center; a bowl of oval shapes in shades of creamy taupe is deployed as one sort of transition, while a blue and cream checkerboard pattern abuts the upward-thrusting planes, the tabletops of modernism laden with a palette of grays and ochers, sweeter tones of blue and bluer samples of green.

espite their evocations of far-flung climes, most of Ballard's works seem to take place indoors or on a terrace - more views with a room than the reverse, since a deep interiority is their most constant element. In "Blue Granados," the chamber of awareness that is the self closes against the brightly crowded scenes of Africa or Mexico, melting in a universal dusk.


Harriet Moore Ballard
Order and Chaos
Through November 10
Bonfoey Gallery
1710 Euclid Ave.
216.621.0178