FOR A MOMENT imagine you are in Andalucia, a southern region of Spain once ruled by Arabic Moors. You enter a courtyard water garden in Granada’s Alhambra, a sprawling labyrinth built by 
Iberia’s Islamic lords. Created by the finest Moorish artisans between the 9th and 14th centuries, the inner court is a paradise where the shadows glow golden, illuminating elegant blue tiles and
elaborate stone and grill work. Fountains trickle, the fresh smell of flowers waft in the air with small insects buzzing about. You sit, meditate, experiencing the beauty and stillness of the space. You are transported to a time and place that is nothing short of divine. 

NOW open your eyes and discover yourself surrounded by Sally Chandler’s paintings. With sacred Arabic script and colorful beetles crawling up tiled motifs, the work instilse a serene calm, like the inner court of the Alhambra. This is the transformative power of Chandler’s work: to connect you with nature plants, animals, humans, insects and to the greater cosmology that binds everything. 

Chandler’s current exhibition, “Beetlemania,” draws on two significant elements of the North African desert: the beetle and Islamic motifs. As a resident of northern New Mexico’s own high desert oasis, Santa Fe, Chandler is no stranger to beetles or the influence of Arabic art. In front of her studio a garden opens up to the Sangre de Cristo mountains where Chandler observes the four seasons pass. On any given Spring or Summer afternoon an entire insect civilization roams among the assorted pansies, morning glories, nasturtiums and dahlias that creep up along an adobe wall decorated with broken-tile mosaic designs. The beetle is one of many creatures who flourish in this enclosure. 

Such enclosures are common in North Africa. With the Spanish colonialists in El Nuevo Mexico, as it was known 400 years ago, came important Arabic innovations for surviving desert climates: adobe, horno ovens, drought resistant crops and trees, and the acequia irrigation system. The turquoise trim found in northern New Mexican homes also comes from the North African legacy in Spain. In a sense, Chandler has absorbed the resonant history of Arabic Spain and brought it back to life in her work. 

Chandler has always incorporated the natural world into her work to promote healing. In addition to lecturing on the relationship between art and nature, in the past she also has held exhibitions with environmental themes focusing on fossils botanicals, butterflies and flowers. Now Chandler uses beetles to connect the viewer with nature’s curative power. “Beetles have a role in keeping the soil fertile,” says Chandler, “they constantly mulch and dig, reinvigorating the soil. I’m using the beetle to pay homage to the natural world.” After visiting a number of natural science museums, Chandler says that beetles “struck me as a beautiful insect, an exotic icon to the natural world.” Moreover, Chandler points out, there are more beetles on earth than any other living organism. 

On the one hand Chandler’s collection of painted beetles is like a glass box of scientific specimens, but at the same time the beetles sparkle like jewels. In her work, the scarabs armour, strong and resilient, contrasts with the flowing patterns of Islamic motifs, or the Tibetan and Celtic designs also used in some paintings. It is Chandler’s belief that by combining beetles with Islamic script, the insects become iconic, like hieroglyphs, invoking a higher power that’s uplifting and healing.  The effect is furthered by Chandler’s mosaic-like approach to painting. Often a painting is composed of many smaller paintings. The repetitive quality is meant to invoke the same kind of feeling of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi who took thousands of tiles, broke them up and rearranged them into abstract patterns in his architectural designs. In addition, Chandler is influenced by the patterning and decoration movement of the ‘70s, founded by painters Robert Kushner and Robert Zakanitch. 

The movement stresses optimism, pursuit of beauty, colourful patterning, course figurative motifs and simple materials. But Chandler draws from the ultimate inspiration of that movement, Henri Matisse. “Matisse is the father of using ornamentation and decorative impulse as a gateway to another world or rapture,” states Chandler. “I’m trying to create a visual experience like Matisse’s work which had an optimism about life and transcendental quality. I hope to communicate a message of healing and life affirmation. I feel that art can be healing, and if that is the intent that I am putting into the paintings, then hopefully that will be communicated to the viewer.” 

Chandler’s ornamentation expands with some pop elements from the Arabic world, like incorporating Moroccan circus posters or Egyptian billboards. All this is to say on a subliminal level
that language is an art form, that words, even if we don't understand their meaning, are iconic. Combined with the beetles, they become semiotic, as if the art is communicating something beyond just painted images. 

“I feel at this point in time we live in a fractured society,” says Chandler. ‘As we approach the millennium, artists have a role in telling stories that heal. By reconnecting to nature, we are able to
appreciate its beauty and restorative capability.” 

Antonio Lopez, 
Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999

Edwards , Holly, ph.D. Islamic Art, publication, "Sally Chandler - Beetlemania" Museum of East Texas, Lufkin TX, January 1999 

In the world of Islam, Arabic script can be both word and image. Sometimes, it can be read easily from right to left, with one letter flowing rhythmically into the next. Elsewhere, the letters may be enturnid and elaborated into elegant but illegible patterns. Whether plain or obscure, however, the script evokes the sacred, for it was used, centuries ago, to record the revelations of God. 

Sally Chandler taps that implicitly sacred character when she combines the script with vividly painted beetles. In the beginning was the Word, she seems to say, and then the world emerged joyfully as its echo. Looking at her paintings, we come a little closer to the sacred that exists all around us.

Two painters celebrate nature in brilliant patterns, mosaics

SAN ANTONIO E XPRESS-NEWS ARTS WRITER
By Dan R. GODDARD

New York painter Robert Kushner founded the pattern and decorative movement in the 1970s, emphasizing bright colour, amorphous form, craft like materials and a cheery optimism. His brilliant collages of flowers, enhanced with gold and metal leaf, arc on view through March 28 at the Parchman Stremmel Galleries along with beetle and floral paintings by Sally Chandler of Austin.

Henri Matisse is often cited as an influence on Kushner, who is probably best known for his exotic paintings on fabric inspired by Middle Eastern design. Far from traditional still life’s, his floral paintings feature close-ups of flowers that are arranged like mosaics with different patterns and textures in almost geometric design. His hydrangeas and orchids break down into brilliant gestural sweeps of colour. Highly worked and textured, the surface of “Villanelle’ is richly accented with copper leaf. Americans have always suspected pleasure,’ Kushner told an interviewer in 1990. To enjoy pleasure, you have to have confidence in it. People don't trust that there's any intellect in work by Matisse or late Picasso. My work offers moments of pleasure to those who are confident of their taste.

Though often lush, Kushner’s work can border on the minimalist. On Japanese handmade paper, “ Forsythia” features the yellow and black flowers delicately highlighted with gold leaf for a serenely elegant effect. His drawings of “Irises” are simple yet beautiful.

Chandler actually uses many different small paintings to make up her quilt like collages of flowers and beetles. The shiny, iridescent bodies of the beetles sparkle like jewels in Chandler’s “Beetle Collection.” The droll “Beetlemania” on brown paper combines scientific precision with a sensual nostalgia for the natural world. She uses glossy tiles to make ceramic images of beetles designed to be displayed on the floor.

Chandler combines up to 100 images of flowers in large works such as ‘Summer” and ‘Autumn.’ With close-ups and distant views, her collages invite close scrutiny, but at a distance converge into complex, brightly coloured patterns. While many artists have abandoned flowers as too fusty and traditional, Kushner and Chandler show that even the most trite and pretty subjects can be made new again.

Exhibits by Robert Kushner and Sally Chandler run through Saturday at Parchman Stremnmel Galleries, 203 N. Presa, 222-2465.