Donald Mitchell at Creative Growth Art Center

An unusual art center in an unlikely location--downtown Oakland's "auto row"--Creative Growth provides studio space and a small gallery for self-taught artists with physical or mental disabilities. In one of their occasional solo shows, the gallery brimmed with 45 works on paper by San Francisco native Donald Mitchell, an artist who has been working at Creative Growth practically since its inception in 1974.

At first glance the work seems so repetitive and graphic one is prone to jump too quickly from picture to picture. Made mostly with a black Sharpie pen on white paper and rarely larger than 22 by 30 inches, Mitchell's drawings feature crowds of the same crude figure arranged in a loose grid like so many crated apples. This protagonist, drawn over and over again, is a stub-armed, stick-legged figure with an oversized head reminiscent of Dubuffet's infantile personages. Because there is no perspective--or, more accurately, it is naively achieved with the notion that the higher the figure is positioned on the paper, the farther away it is--his front-facing figures press against the picture plane. The easy opticality of the resulting pattern is at odds with the unsettling imagery and self-taught drawing style.

Most impressive here is Mitchell's grasp of formal relations: a sense of proportion, an ability to negotiate negative versus positive space, and varied density of line are all abundantly apparent. In one of many undated works in this selection from the mid-1980s to the present, the gradually descending stacks of figures form an Ellsworth Kellyesque wedge on otherwise blank paper. In another, columns of figures stacked single-file form a striped pattern.

Elsewhere the impulse to scribble seems to overtake formal concerns. Patches of Mitchell's characteristic scribbling might grow into boulderlike shapes of ink. (In the accompanying book, which gives the full breadth of the artist's work, there is a striking drawing showing a single, voluminous haystack-shaped one.)

In his rigorous, restrictive method, Mitchell also exhibits a minimalist's penchant for self-imposed do's and don'ts. For instance, always "color in" the body but never the face; scribbles must stay inside the lines; use color only in paintings (acrylic house paint on board). Mitchell's work suggests that what we think of as modernist visual style is something innate, not learned.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group