Winkfield's vocations: for a recent series of paintings, Trevor Winkfield took as his subject various fields of human endeavor, from ornithology to navigation to poetry. As is this artist's wont, the compositions are zany, enigmatic and disjunctive

I once watched a pair of clowns hurry a donkey across Fifth Avenue. One clown was pushing the beast, and the other was pulling it. The two men held on so tightly that the trio's many-legged, three-headed movements appeared to be those of a single conflicted animal. On another occasion, I was forced off the sidewalk by a dozen dogs of various breeds and sizes, pulling a frazzled woman by their leashes. A small monkey, wearing a red fez and diaper, straddled her head like a practiced jockey. There is something about such occasions--unexpected, matter-of-fact and topsy-turvy--that invariably makes me think of Trevor Winkfield's paintings, in which bizarre encounters abound, though governed by etiquette and a seriously silly sense of gamesmanship.

These qualities are on vivid display in Winkfield's "Vocations" paintings, which were the main focus of his most recent New York exhibition. All the compositions feature hard-edge, electrically cool, poster-color shapes, and they have the intimate scale and printed feel of maps, puzzles and game boards. As the overall title suggests, the subject is the theater of work, with its costumes, decorum and muses. In acrylic paintings that range in size from about 2 1/2 by 3 to 4 by 5 feet, the artist portrays ornithologist, poet, astrologer, navigator, gypsy and painter through the mechanisms, symbols, dreams and paraphernalia of their professions.

The totem figures in these portraits are composed of all manner of stuff--circus performers, mythical beings, assorted flora and fauna--that seems to have been disassembled into manageable pieces and reconstructed almost by chance. But chance has nothing to do with it: each painting is based on a meticulous, full-scale collage of painted-paper cutouts, an origin that obviously contributes to the paintings' crisply delineated forms.

For his highly stylized imagery, Winkfield draws from a mixture of visual and literary sources, including medieval manuscripts and Egyptian wall painting as well as popular ephemera, 19th-century children's books and Sienese frescoes. The inspiration for the protagonist of The Poet (2001), for instance, was the contorted figure in the miniature of Ezra Restoring the Bible, from the 8th-century Codex Amiatinus, which was made in a scriptorium near Leeds, England (Winkfield's birthplace). According to the artist, this ancient image was key to his understanding of how to relate figure to ground in an abstract space. Many other figures in the series owe something to a depiction of St. Paul, bent over and shaking a viper off his hand, in a Romanesque fresco from Canterbury Cathedral. The original is noteworthy for its mixture of swelling volume and flat pattern.

Nothing in a Winkfield painting allows for a straightforward narrative or a single meaning. In this sense, although much of the imagery is recognizable, the paintings can seem abstract. In The Poet, the winged subject appears to be sitting at a table, writing with a corn-stalk spear, though he might just as plausibly be described as sitting in a boat and using the spear as an oar. Pipes extend from his head like horns or, perhaps, old-fashioned hearing aids, and his muse is a multicolored bird atop what looks like a pink souffle. Another bird, seemingly on loan from Georges Braque, a wax-sealed letter in its beak, flies in through a window that frames a black, nighttime sky where, in several layers of paradox, the artist deploys a shining sun and a rain cloud.

Born in 1944, Winkfield moved from England to New York in 1969. In addition to his painting activity, he has written on Vermeer [see A.i.A., May '96], Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and Gerald Murphy; collaborated with numerous poets and writers [see sidebar]; and edited and translated works by Raymond Roussel, the early 20th-century French author, playwright and punster-supreme who greatly influenced the Surrealists. Roussel made use of "metagrams" Winkfield explains, "whereby the meaning of a word is changed by altering a letter." This fits to a tee Winkfield's process, where the meanings of objects and of their interactions are in constant flux because of a well-placed fish, feather or leaf.

As in Cornell's assemblages, Winkfield's forms first and foremost make compositional sense through size, shape and color, but then the layered meanings of thing-to-thing--through analogy, rhythm and context--start to avalanche. He also makes excellent use of multiple viewpoints (aerial, frontal, profile) to establish spatial and narrative complexities. The stark, brightly colored Self-Portrait (2001), a classical, vertical self-portrait in the French tradition, portrays the artist, central and in profile, as Greek god, Native American warrior and target under attack. At once portrait and hieroglyph, rebus and object, image and sign, Self-Portrait is as hierarchical and emblematic as the ancient Egyptian Narmer Palette, and, as so often with Winkfield, frames open within frames, like a Cubist nest of boxes. An arrow passes close to the artist's head, which is adorned with antlers, and birds attack, having broken a decorative border of colored paper chains. The painter's torso, made of a palette or shield that trails wings or oars, is splattered with highly stylized daubs of paint that evoke not only paint but also open wounds, swooping birds or, even, bird droppings. Looking like targets in a shooting gallery, eight ripe tomatoes pass laterally between three swordlike forms (phalluses? udders?) hanging beneath the painter. The artist, as portrayed here, is simultaneously martyred saint, sitting duck and assembly line.

All the careers in "Vocations" are volatile journeys during which the tasks, tools and performers of the jobs must be improvised and reinvented. The bejeweled, feathered figure in The Gypsy (1999), two-faced and spinning in a garden without up or down, offers, as wares, worlds framed with flowers that flow upward out of ice-cream cones. The seer of The Astrologer (2001) juggles a life-cycle of forms that shift from a child's jacks to religious symbols to stars.

Usually, I find that Winkfield's smaller canvases, more restrained and less complex, are, therefore, less engaging (with Winkfield, the bigger the zanier; and the zanier the better). But the small, understated Poet's Table (2000), at 28 by 30 1/2 inches, a meditation on the poetic impulse, achieves a startling balance between gestation and the energy of line. In this painting, palpable tension is felt between active pattern and two figurative vases or muses, one vertical, drawn in white on a black field, and the other reclining, a yellow shape entombed in red. The Poet's Table is succinct, secretive, and imbued with mysterious voices more suggestive of an inner range.

Winkfield's cabinets of curiosities seduce us with the madness of their inventions, and convince us of their nonsense through clarity. Imprisoned in wrapping-paper worlds, his figures appear to be both hunting for and juggling the forms that will complete them. There is a danger in the pursuit, in the weird disjunctions, in the guillotinelike abruptness, and yet Winkfield's beautifully enigmatic characters, reminiscent of the harlequins of Watteau and Picasso, continue to entertain and confound us as they perform.

RELATED ARTICLE: Literary liaisons.

Over the last several decades, some of Trevor Winkfield's most loyal fans have been poets and writers, including John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Kenward Elmslie, Larry Fagin, Ron Padgett and the late James Schuyler. This affinity is perhaps not so surprising, given that Winkfield has long been a passionate follower of experimental writing. As a young man in England, he published a literary magazine, Juillard, and has also written a volume of quirky short stories and translated Raymond Roussel's How I Wrote Certain of My Books.

Winkfield has been an enthusiastic illustrator of poems and stories by his writer friends, contributing enigmatic drawings and bold graphic designs to numerous books, often in elegantly produced limited editions. The most recent of these, Snippets, published this year by Tibor de Nagy Editions, combines Elmslie's fragmentary, diaristic prose with eight of Winkfield's drawings. This follows a previous volume, Cyberspace, which twins Elmslie's bebopping poems with reproductions of 21 Winkfield collages (Granary Books, 2000). An earlier collaborative effort between Winkfield and Harry Mathews, "The Way Home," is newly available in Mathews's The Human Country: New and Selected Stories (Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), which also features Winkfield's painting The Poet on the cover. Winkfield's enigmatic black-and-white drawings for "The Way Home," no two of which are alike, interrupt Mathews's dreamlike story at unforeseen moments, enhancing and complicating its restrained lyricism and precise naming of everyday objects.

Followers of Winkfield's work might wonder why his exhibitions never include the originals of the drawings he makes for his literary collaborations. The explanation is simple and shocking: once the writing-inspired drawings have appeared in book form, Winkfield tears them up and throws them away! "Their reproduction achieves my ideal by reducing them to total flatness," writes the artist in an unpublished essay, "and I can't imagine a better fate for them than that."--Raphael Rubinstein

"Trevor Winkfield: Vocations" was seen at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York [Jan. 5-Feb. 2, 2002].

Lance Esplund is a writer living in New York and a columnist for Modern Painters.

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