They Drink & Fly Away

Artists are seldom modest folk. They have enough troubles without trying to bridle the human vanity that, likely as not, feeds their art. But 47-year-old Painter Isabel Bishop is an exception to the rule. "Sometimes I think I've got nerve," she cries, waving her long bony hands in the air, "to paint at all!"

Critics and collectors disagree with her. Isabel Bishop's paintings hang in more than a dozen of the country's top museums; when a Manhattan gallery last week staged her first show of oils in ten years, it had to borrow almost half of the show from previous buyers. A painstaking worker, Bishop finishes only four or five paintings a year.

Today's Fun. Seen together, her pictures looked extraordinarily alike in tone and content. Thinly painted in tempera and oil glazes on pressed-wood panels, they all had the vague shimmer of reflections in a forest pool. Their subject was almost invariably girls, mainly girls who spend their nights in Brooklyn and Queens rooming houses and their days working in the garment lofts, offices and novelty factories around Manhattan's Union Square, where Bishop has her studio.

The worn, plump, pallid figures never looked posed; they were painted as Bishop had first sketched them, in the park or subway or on the street, licking ice-cream cones, reading newspapers, chatting on park benches. There was no glamour in Bishop's handling of them, and no heavy realism either. Her models might be too rumpled and dispirited for Vogue magazine, but they shared a dreamlike solemnity and detachment that is seldom found on the street.

Artist Bishop freely admits her subject-matter is limited. "I try to limit content, to limit everything," she explains, "in order to get down to something in my work. You know, I'm glad this isn't one of the great periods of art. I could never paint a great subject, and the fun about painting today is that we don't have to. We can paint the little things, things that perhaps no one noticed before."

Like Birds. One such "little thing" in Bishop's new show was a picture of a girl bending to drink from a fountain in Union Square. "I've got pages & pages of sketches of men and girls drinking out of that fountain," she says. "You know, most people lift one leg when they drink. Some put their hands behind them. Others embrace the bowl. But it's so quick and nice -- nice-like birds, they drink and fly away -- and I have a devil of a time. You could easily pose a person there, of course, but that wouldn't be it. I struggle for months & months to make it look as momentary as it really is."

To get that effect, Bishop half-conceals her figures in shifting shadows and dim spangles of light. She highlights some shapes with dabs of tempera, underlines some with India ink scratches, blurs others out. As a result, her subjects seem to be glimpsed through the rich, hazy surfaces of her pictures. Their evanescent quality led one critic to remark that Bishop was battling an insidious foe, "none other than invisibility."

Isabel Bishop lives with her husband, Neurologist Harold G. Wolff, and their nine-year-old son in suburban Riverdale, commutes to her Union Square studio five days a week ("Some people say they can't work in the city, but no one ever bothers me here"). She lunches standing up at a nearby soda fountain, watching the people around her and "hoping for something to paint." A tall, brisk woman with braided black hair and attentive brown eyes, Isabel Bishop looks rather like a chemistry teacher in her tattered white working smock.

But her enthusiasm is more like a beginning student's than a teacher's; after 30 years of painting she still delights in the problems and sparkles with the possibilities of art. "I use the most awful criterion for my own work," she says. "I ask, 'Is it so?' A thing may be just as nicely rendered, just as well composed, as can be, and yet be completely un-so!"

As her exhibition proved, Bishop's work was neither glamorous nor great. But the quiet conviction in her pictures commanded respect; they were "so."

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