Lucy Currie

VISUAL ARTS: BACK STORY / The artist behind the art:
Delicate sophistication Sweet, shy manner shapes drawing detail

BYLINE:    CATHERINE FOX
Staff
DATE: October 17, 2004
PUBLICATION: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (GA)
EDITION: Home; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SECTION: Arts & Books
PAGE: L10

Lucy Currie 's tiny drawings are deceptively schoolgirlish. Her supplies are pencil and crayon. Her paper has the jaggedy edge that comes from being ripped out of a spiral sketchbook. The animals and figures that float on the page are flat and childlike.

  But don't be fooled. This is the work of a sophisticated artist, with a sensitivity to color, a deft use of erasure and a delicate, subtly changing touch. Look closely -- and you must to really see these drawings -- and you might find a stick-figure-ish girl next to a pithy silhouette of a praying figure that could have come out of a Renaissance painting.

  "If you know drawings, you know how exquisite they are," says dealer Timothy Tew, who represented her at one time. "Even in their awkwardness, everything is beautiful -- proportion, line that's soft and elegant."

  Tew raves about her paintings, too. "She's a great colorist," he says. "She lives in the paint."

  After a few minutes in the soft-spoken artist's company, you see that, far from being a faux naif, Currie , 48, is simply channeling the sweetness and innocence that radiate from her.

  "It comes from her heart," says artist Benjamin Jones, whose drawings share the walls with hers at the Swan Coach House Gallery.

  "Art is a search," she says. "I'm trying to find something, trying to excavate."

Currie isn't sure what she is searching for, but it doesn't matter. "It's the journey that's important," she says.

  The Atlanta native works intuitively. Content comes out as she draws or paints. Memories float through the wispy drawings -- the elephants and rhinos seen during an African safari, her late father's model airplanes, Lula Belle, a kitten who was her "little muse."

  But it's not just memories. The shadow of one of her diminutive elephants gets Currie talking about Plato's Cave. The little figures that populate "Brueghel's Bubble" were inspired, as the title suggests, by the 16th-century Flemish artist's peasant scenes.

  "What happens during the day becomes part of the work, too," she says. "Moment. Coincidences. A bird will sing. The telephone might ring."

  Each of her pieces consists of 36 drawings arranged in six rows of six. Each piece has its own theme, though Currie does not consider it a narrative, and its own palette. In "Brueghel's Bubble," for example, she uses Crayola's Sheen Green and Illuminating Emerald -- colors that look like they might glow in the dark.

  When she's done, she hangs the drawings up in the order in which she made them. Then she proceeds to rearrange them.

  "I am looking for formal relationships," she explains.

  It's a long process, she says, because each change causes a ripple effect, requiring many other calibrations. When you stand back and look at one of her pieces, it reads almost like an abstraction.

Currie 's interest in art started at home. She still remembers the art books she and her mother pored over when she was a child. Mentors included James Herbert at the University of Georgia and Wayne Thiebaud at the University of California at Davis. Currie also benefited from a residency at Skowhegan, a prestigious art colony, in the early '80s. She still treasures the moment when the late Louise Nevelson, serving as a visiting critic, gave her an A+.

  During the following decade, Currie , who is extremely shy, devoted herself to making art as opposed to advancing her career. Then, when she married banker Henry Bush in 1992, she virtually stopped working.

  "I had to learn to be a wife and a daughter-in-law," she explains. "I'd been so involved in art."

  Curator Marianne Lambert, a longtime supporter with strong opinions, thought that 12 years was long enough. She wanted Currie to get back to work, and she devised a plan to jump-start the process. About 1 1/2 years ago, Lambert asked her to be in a show with Jones at the Swan Coach House Gallery. She thought the prospect would appeal to Currie because of her friendship with Jones and their mutual admiration for each other's work.

  When Currie consented, Lambert, ever the mother hen, further encouraged her by arranging for the three of them to meet every few months.

  Lambert's plan worked. Currie has re-emerged with her skills and sensibility intact, with work that speaks to the eternal child in everyone.