Portfolio Edwin Dorris
By Patricia Highsmith
One bends and peers closely at Edwin Dorris' paintings. It looks like a real thumbtack pinning a color photograph to the canvas. But on very close inspection, one sees that it isn't a real thumbtack, it's painted there, down to the faint shadow that a thumbtack would cast at its rounded edge. And what one thought was a color photograph of a soccer team is also Ed Dorris' brushwork.
But Ed Dorris is emphatically not a realist, not a duplicator of soup tins and Coca-Cola bottles standing alone, as if in mockery of both modern art and the art of photography. Dorris has an idea behind every picture, and his titles are literary, explanatory, and funny.
‘Virgin on the Rocks’ is one: a doll, female of course, with a sickeningly sweet face and lips, and undersized dainty hands, strides forward provocatively in her baby clothes and baby booties, one hand flung back against a section of pinewood fence that is as real as real can be in its appearance. And ‘She’ depicts what might be Eve, apple in hand, but ‘she’ is a headless dummy, a mannikin with jointed wooden arms and a little ornament, suitable for the top of a table lamp, rises from her neck. Her red and white striped dress is elegant, but behind her stands a plain bench with a cabbage on it, meticulously painted, a very real item ordinarily found in kitchens, symbolic of the female's chores, obligations, and her inavoidable down-to-earthness.
Some of Ed Dorris' still-lifes-apples in trio, a quartet of pears, on plain backgrounds - seem out of another century, the seventeenth perhaps. They are beautiful for their quality of painting alone. And then one is jolted into the twentieth century or further by the male athlete doing a handstand on a pair of familiar circular traffic discs, one indicating no parking and the other a one-way street. The foreground is a jumble of admonitory train and car signals: stop, danger, and so on. The title: ‘Tell Me, Does the Milktrain Ever Stop Here Any More?’
If the value and importance of an artist's work is based upon his own personality, then Ed Dorris comes through very nicely and strongly. You are not going to confuse his work with anyone else's. His ability to simulate the real and tangible when he wishes to is to be marvelled at. His themes - or why he painted such a picture in the first place - are truly his own. He seems to be saying that there is a lot of beauty in the world in the form of natural objects such as fish, fruit and even wood, but that humans can concoct a great deal of phoneyness. At least Ed Dorris makes that phoneyness amusing and surprising, and occasionally beautiful in its own way.
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