Elizabeth Ockwell at Gallery Mornea

Elizabeth Ockwell revels in ornate architecture. Baroque ornamentation, marble cupids and gold leaf are her cup of tea. She makes pen, pencil and watercolor drawings of the Ca'd'Oro in Venice, the Paris Opera (Palais Gamier) staircase and similar structures. These places are "so innocently confident in their excesses," she says, and so "brutally luxurious" that they give her "permission to exaggerate, invent, and obsess."

Architectural details confuse the artist and this pleases her. Details challenge her to make visual sense of a scene, to gather them in and lay claim to them. Her final images are never scrupulously realistic. To personify the architecture and intensify its fantasy, she takes liberties with building proportions and draws curves, curlicues and fanciful shapes at the edges of her images. She is, she says, happiest "in the corners."

Ockwell, who teaches in Chicago, spent two months in Paris one summer. Carefully selecting complicated views in the Palais Gamier and other locations, she found a center to each scene and organized drawings around it. Affixing the paper to a board in her lap, she drew on it in pen and used small patches of subdued watercolor as accents. Back in her room, she penciled in perspective lines, which became a kind of cage on which she hung details.

Ockwell's basic technique has changed little in 30 years, though she made figure drawings and portraits for two decades before architecture became her principal subject matter. Her hero is Leonardo, but she also admires Turner and Ruskin because they loved Venice, and Gaspar van Wittel, a Dutch Baroque landscape painter.

"Beyond Normal," Ockwell's recent solo exhibition at Gallery Mornea, included four pen, ink and watercolor drawings measuring 41 by 29 inches; nine etchings and aquatints of architectural scenes in Vienna, Venice and Chicago; and two Epson prints of architectural scenes. To make Epson prints, she employs a wide format printer, which scans and digitizes an 8-by-10-inch negative, and prints with archival inks. The Epson printer makes her "feel like a giant," says the artist, because it's so easy to change scale and still get detail that's as crisp as the original.

Ockwell has spent her life mastering traditional techniques and using them to depict familiar things. We tend to expect novelty from artists, and it's easy to overlook the skill, invention and joy of living that she puts into her work. This exhibition was a virtuoso feat.

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