Exotic imaginings

Visual Art

Julianna Thibodeaux

'Paphiopedilum' by Robert Lostutter, part of his show at the Herron Galleries

Robert Lostutter
Herron Galleries
Through May 27

When the first Europeans arrived on the North American continent, it was inevitable that they would try and capture the essence of the native people they encountered here through art. The first artists who drew Native Americans depicted them as they both saw and imagined them: stoic and proud — not quite human, not quite animal, their headdresses and face paint suggestive of their exotic otherness.

When I first viewed the stunningly intricate watercolor drawings of Robert Lostutter, who captures an imagined world where male humans sprout feathers, beaks and even leaves, and often have exotically colored skin, I recalled those early drawings of Native Americans, when Europeans easily and happily, if blindly, projected their animal shadow onto them. The natives were the “savages” — at their best, “noble savages” — and we needed to contend with them only as long as they were kept in check. As we all know, they weren’t.

Lostutter’s biomorphic beings suggest our shadow is no longer contented to lie elsewhere; indeed, it never was. We are animals, human animals; and the gap between us and our animal nature — or “Nature” with a capital “N” — is not as wide as we imagine. So we best come to terms with it. In Lostutter’s world, Nature demands it. We best surrender — or she will claim us.

Born in 1939, Lostutter is associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the late ’50s and early ’60s, many of whom showed at the Phyllis Kind Gallery. Chicago critic James Yood characterized Imagist work as having “funky and irreverent subject matter (often with sexual and/or violent overtones, with imaginative fantasies dealing with the figure under extreme physical or psychological stress), a predilection for narrative themes drawn from vernacular sources, a decided openness to influences from self-taught artists and from sources outside the mainstream of Western art history, a taste for garish and obsessively busy small-scale compositions driven by a concern for symmetry and a linear approach to the figure, surrealistic whimsy and ironic and caustic humor undercutting the ‘serous’ status of the art object, high-keyed color, scrupulous and fastidious craftspersonship tending toward the suppression of evidence of the experiential residue of the artist’s hand, and iconic independence and idiosyncratic mannerism of the most manic sort.”

Lostutter’s work is all this and more: His human creatures are certainly suggestive of fantasy, the human figure undergoing extreme stress — evidenced by the at once terrified, determined and almost sinister expressions that manifest in his figures who are coming to terms with their transformation, or at least succumbing to it.

Said to use an almost dry brush, Lostutter makes his images carefully and with painstaking attention to detail, realizing a single painting may take months. Certainly, this suggests a certain manic nature — a determined focus in conveying his images with obsessive uniqueness in both style and content.
Whether Lostutter’s art is defined in the Imagist rubric or not, certainly his concerns have fit into Yood’s assessment of it. Yood and others have commented on the subversive sexuality inherent in Lostutter’s images of human birds, their colorful plumage and focused stare suggestive of the archetypal drive towards physical union on the one hand, and procreation-driven copulation on the other. It’s lust and reproduction in one fell swoop — but the soul is absent.

I contend that this further connects Lostutter’s images with our early fear of Native Americans: their easy connection (indeed, a symbiotic one) with Earth, and by extension, Nature — the kind they lived with and the kind within. After all, one is the metaphor of the other. But their connection to Earth, to Nature, was certainly a soulful one, and this is where we humans seem to have most difficulty. Ever compartmentalizing, we can’t seem to bring the soul back to sexuality. And Lostutter’s images suggest as much.

Imagine awakening one day to find feathers where there once was hair, or a beak where there was once a nose. Would you think you were still asleep? If you did finally wake up, realizing that yes, it was a dream, would you feel terror, or delight in surrender?

Robert Lostutter: Show, including 50 works from the late 1980s almost to the present, is on view at Herron Galleries, Herron School of Art and Design, 735 W. New York St., through May 27. Gallery hours: daily from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. and Thursdays until 7. Free and open to the public. Call 317-78-9419 for more information.