Sally Chandler / Bibliography:  click here to return to articles

Lopez, Antonio, publication, "Sally Chandler - Beetlemania"
Ellen Noel Art Museum, Odessa Texas, Sept. 1999

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.

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.

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