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An
Afternoon With Bliss In Hell Rachel Bliss is a world unto a herself. Her show, “Through My Eyes,” is a carnival of dangers and anxieties populated by infants, ambulatory pigs and devils of every stripe, all caught in the act of perpetrating outrages against the complacent, all of it happening beneath the gaze of Bliss, whose thin, intense face stares out of a good half-dozen self-portraits scattered throughout the show. This pristine artist all but personifies the pleasures and pains of creation. If there were such a thing as “Method Painters,” she’d be the Brando of the school. She seems incapable of not feeling deeply what she paints, and because she paints her world - not bowls of fruit or strands of trees - much of what she creates comes across as a prolonged, angry shout in the ear of an indifferent creation. “Must These Things Be” could serve as a motto for the show. Bliss sees a world of AIDS victims, crack peddlers, slum landlords, racists, even predatory gallery owners - and she screams her rage and her pain at them. If Bliss were a Realist, this would mean lots of vacant stares from broken sitters. But Bliss possesses the gift, taking the pain and transforming rage into striking, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying visions. On first walk-through, I though I detected a variety of influences, mostly Nolde and a bit of Fini (especially in the self-portraits). But on a more careful examination, I realized that these impressions were probably accidental. I don’t know whether Bliss is an original or not; I can only say that she seems that way to me. “Through My Eyes” is a fairly extensive sampling of her works, containing no fewer that 67 oils some quite small. (These, I’m told, are painted snapshots.) Certainly it’s enough to give you a sense of her world-view. Hers is a sad, angry world. I wish I could say that her art gives her comfort, but it seems not to. It’s the safety valve by which she lets off steam. But she’s not entirely without faith. Bliss seems, in fact, to be a religious painter lost in a secular forest, thrashing and slashing wildly to get free. “Plenty More Room in Hell for Slumlords and Racists” sums up the apocalyptic nature of Bliss’s painted jeremiads. Her anger is directed at us all - and at herself as well. She paints what she sees, and she sees a world badly out of joint - where children run to drug peddlers the way the used to target the Good Humor man, where people tolerate abusive and destructive relationships, where the law frequently can’t hold (and may end up as a hindrance), where man literally devours his fellow man and rationalizes, “It’s Only Food.” If she were a less visually powerful artist, it could be a really depressing affair. But Bliss is determined to make us hear her cry. The 67th and last painting is aptly titled, “Where Were You?” This is what she seems to be asking us all though our tour of her past and present season in hell.
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