Salute to the Singular

Freckle-faced Joyce Treiman hurls herself at canvas with the intuitive abandon of an action painter, piling on pigment in swooshes and swirls. What emerges is not abstraction but a troubling glimpse of the individual caught up in what she calls "a singular, momentary event." Her figures (see opposite page) seemingly wear the tatterdemalion costumes of burlesque or the circus. Some seem to be mimes from a private dream world; others, characters in a far-out fairy tale.

Appearance v. Reality. After taking her B.F.A. at the State University of Iowa, which is turning out many able young figurative artists (among others: John Paul Jones, Jane Wilson), Chicago-born Joyce Treiman (she rhymes it with Freeman) plunged into abstract expressionism six years ago but soon wearied of its "idealized anonymity." Suddenly, she says, she rediscovered "the particular human being, the singular gesture, the individual--not the hero." She started watching people, even hiring models to avoid painting cliche anatomy, sketching particular faces and gestures that, says she, "somehow find their way" into her pictures. But her figures in oils, including 22 paintings in a one-man show at Chicago's Fairweather-Hardin Gallery this month, are mostly creatures of an intensely personal vision.

To all appearances, except for the inordinate amount of time she spends holed up in her garage-studio, Joyce Treiman, 41, lives the life of a busy housewife in Southern California's Pacific Palisades. A driving, diminutive (5 ft.) redhead with a trooper's vocabulary, she is married to a real-estate dealer, has a 13-year-old son.

(Their dog is called Mr. Bonnard.) Behind her seemingly bland suburban life, she is passionately preoccupied with the conflict between appearance and reality. Her bizarrely clad and contorted figures, divided fore and aft in space, are rounded with confusing contours, so that they float between the flat surface of the canvas and its artfully contrived depths.

No Orange Blobs. Although Treiman's work returns to the figure, she vehemently shuns the dehumanized faces that spare many fashionable artists any need to confront the individual. "No orange blobs," says she. "I'll paint a face where there is one." On a recent swing around the Mediterranean, she discovered at first hand the proto-baroque painters, Ribera and Caravaggio, and has borrowed their theatrical use of localized light to heighten her figures' impression of stirring the air around them.

Treiman's enthusiasm has been shared by others. She has garnered 18 awards and four fellowships, including a 1963 Ford Foundation grant. She has become engrossed in sculpture as well, turns out tiny bronzes that prance, preen and posture with all the assurance of statuary weighing tons. By combining her small bronzes with her oils, she hopes to make a synthesis between the daydream illusion of oils and the rocky reality of sculpture. Like her oils, her metal figurines capture strikingly the singular event, the particular human being. "These for me," says Joyce Treiman, "are a summing up and a viva."

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