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Teetering on the line between coy decoration and daring eccentricity, Lucy Maki's new paintings vary nearly from one work to the next, each looking as if it has been an adventure mapped somewhere between Oz and quiz-show design.      Like other post modern art that uses decoration as a dominant element (Michael Graves' and Charles Moore's architecture, for example), Maki avoids pedantic abstraction and invents a high spirited, quirky formalism. Her snappy, unpredictable attitude toward design results in large, shaped paintings that look like they should tick, that parts should spin, float, or roll off. In fact, some of her most startling innovations occur in the three-dimensional items she attaches to her surfaces and her frames.      Like the Pop artists and the Dadaists before her, Maki makes art "high" by elevating the "low," i.e., the decorative arts. She happily absorbs into her vocabulary any shape, motif or color that energizes, surprises, moves, teases.      Whether eccentric abstraction such as Maki's is a manifestation of personality or environment is not known, but it is rare. Others who have revealed this unexplainable bent include William Blake, Paul Klee and Nancy Graves. In fact, a relevant detail from Blake's biography is his disagreement with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others of the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1780), who believed that art is a distillation and generalization of forms found in nature. Blake maintained, as does Maki, that ideal forms are not drawn from nature but from the imagination "I empty

LUCY MAKI: ELEVATING THE DECORATIVE Sandy Ballatore     Lucy Maki, Sphinx, 84" x 63", mixed media, 1989. Courtesy Linda Durham Gallery, Santa Fe.

my mind before I draw, like the Abstract Expressionists did, to become less contrived, more fresh," said Maki in a recent interview. "It's like humming a song that hasn't been written down yet. You don't know what it will be until you finish."      Although color is often intense, and dark/light patterns animate the surface, shape is Maki's most beloved element. "After I make them [the paintings], I know that the shapes mean something, so sometimes I look them  up in A Dictionary of Symbols[J.E.Cirlot], but that's just an

aside. I look to see if the meaning relates [to what I  was thinking] and it usually does."     Says Joseph Campbell in the Powers of Myth, "The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world... There's an old romantic idea in German, das Volk dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe.

Sandy Ballatore, "Lucy Maki: Elevating the Decorative," Artspace, September/October 1989

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