Bettie Ward's garden paintings aren't just pretty, they're pretty great

SANTA FE — As I entered the room in LewAllen Galleries with Bettie Ward’s colorful paintings of flower- and bird-filled gardens, I felt the air change. Her relentlessly cheery art lifted my mood instantly. And that’s not an experience I have with art very often, oddly enough.

Over 25 years ago, I heard the art theorist Arthur Danto speak at my college, and I internalized his notion that contemporary artists are, or should be, philosophers. Danto wasn’t opposed to beauty. He just saw it as an optional ingredient. What really matters are their ideas. His perspective resonated with me then, and it still does.

Even when confronted with colorful, flowery paintings by people such as Beatriz Milhazes, Nina Bovasso and Elisabeth Condon, I’ve tended to interpret such work intellectually, as purposefully transgressive, feminist subversions of minimalism. Just as the minimalists had been aggressively iconoclastic in their rejection of figuration, decoration and color, those artists were equally iconoclastic in their rejection of minimalism. The art couldn’t be more different, but the force behind it — the fighting spirit — was the same, like opposite poles of a magnet. That’s what I liked about it. For other maximalist artists, such as Joan Snyder, the primary target wasn’t minimalism but abstract expressionism. But Snyder’s gold paint and flowers were just as subversive.

If you’re familiar with those artists, you’ll no doubt see visual echoes in Ward’s art. But Ward doesn’t appear to be wrestling with art history in the same way. Walking through her current exhibition, “My Life as a Flower,” felt like walking through a Mughal pleasure garden. Such gardens are pleasing not only for their overall geometry but for the rich contrasts of color, texture and fragrance they offer on the micro level. Ward’s paintings give a similar cornucopia of visual treats and small surprises, which were so enjoyable that I barely thought about art history at all.

At first glance, the clusters of flowers in “My Magnificent Inner World” and “Every Flower a Caress” may look stereotyped and repetitive, almost like children’s drawings, but their faux-naïf appearance belies their aesthetic sophistication. Ward clearly loves to mix paints, and she’s exceptionally good at it. Sometimes she outlines her forms with complementary colors — green and red, orange and teal — and sometimes juxtaposes slightly different hues and values to create a push-pull of dimensionality in otherwise flat forms. Like Chuck Close in his later works, Ward maintains complete control over her colors without ever looking fussy.

Some of the flowers are made by scrawling into wet paint with the back of her paintbrush. Elsewhere, she uses a palette knife to make chunky square petals. And even though she clusters her flowers into discrete compositional shapes, as in Rajput landscape paintings, she doesn’t sacrifice the specificity of each individual flower. I doubt she paints from observation, because the flowers don’t have a naturalistic appearance. But neither does she paint the same flower over and over. Without imitating nature, she uses a multiplicity of styles, techniques and color palettes to suggest the rich variety of nature. Her attention to detail and endless inventiveness are ultimately what separate her from those legions of lesser artists who like to paint pretty flowers but don’t have her chops.

Ward’s birds are even more distinctive from one another than her flowers. The coppery one in “Cooing and Surprisingly Real” resembles a sea lion, and the little pink one that the woman in “My Magnificent Inner World” holds in the palm of her hand looks like a shower pouf or a scrunchie. In other paintings, Ward sews brassy metal bird ornaments that a friend makes onto her canvases, because — why not? I could make up a story about what the brass birds mean in the context of art history — the valorization of folk art traditions and so on — but maybe they’re just supposed to look pretty. And what’s wrong with that?

I’ll admit that as a bird person, I’m a bit biased. My canary, Scheherazade, wakes me up every morning by flying around my bedroom, chirping sweetly, and I find everything she does delightful. If Ward had painted more cats than birds, perhaps I’d be less generous in my critique. But probably not. Good painting is good painting, regardless of subject matter.

I love the informality of Ward’s paintings, which remind me of the loose, Surrealist-inspired drawings of Jean Cocteau. The titles, which she paints onto her compositions in big cursive letters, even remind me of Cocteau’s handwriting. Like him, she hardly ever writes in a straight line. Her work is as playful and spontaneous as the cocktail-party art games of the Surrealists — automatic drawing, exquisite corpse and the like — but without the pretention of plumbing the subconscious mind for hidden psychodramas. Her paintings are fun and free.

As someone who tends to approach art intellectually, though, they caught me off guard. I couldn’t justify the worth of her paintings in terms of any underlying philosophical or art historical criteria, which irritated me. Why did I like them so much? Like a machete chopping though brambles, the pure visual pleasure of Ward’s craft cut through my tangled art critic thoughts. And against my usual objections to overly pretty art, it made me feel happy.

I still agree with Danto that contemporary art need not be beautiful. But maybe it doesn’t always have to be so brainy, either. Sometimes beauty is enough. And if an artist can get me to stop and smell the flowers, honestly, what’s not to love about that?

A particularly fitting show for soaking up the last days of summer, go see it before it closes on Sept. 20.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.