The surreal world Emily Lisker's wonderland BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Emily Lisker, Paintings and Illustrations. At the Hoxie Art Gallery through December 28.

The entrance to the Hoxie Gallery at Westerly Public Library is hardly a rabbit hole, but entering the surreal imaginings of Emily Lisker, Paintings and Illustrations is certainly to enter a wonderland.

The influences, homages, and outright quotes on display are like a survey of 20th-century art history: Picasso's saltimbanques and other circus characters; Chagall's hovering lovers and shtetl inhabitants on rooftops; quixotic Dali-esque imagery on desolate landscapes; bizarre figures against dark backgrounds as though swimming in the inky seas of Joan Miró's canvases.

These nearly 30 oil paintings are a mix of works that were originally assigned as periodical and book illustrations, as well as those without initial marching orders. Fortunately, the former are not locked into whatever their text references were, and neither are they merely decorative, the main limitations of mediocre illustration. The commercially-born work shares with the personal paintings a vitality and imagination that make them re-viewable, even without their frequent humor.

The cover of the 1993 book Feast Here Awhile: Adventures in American Eating comes as close as Lisker gets -- at least on display here -- to a straightforward depiction for a text without evoking anything further. And yet. On a red- and-white checkered table cloth are a wine bottle and artichokes, a three-tier cake and a loaf of bread, and so on for a conventional if busy still life. But Lisker couldn't resist including a black cat to look over this all with unavoidable mischievous intent, as well as a pulled-back red curtain (a frequent image in the show) to add a touch of theatricality to the subject of feasting.

More typical of her illustration motifs are period figures, especially from the Roaring '20s. The show's invitation card used "Jazz with Fruit," the cover of the 1996 New York Book of Music. As well as that black cat and red curtain, we have a clarinet player leaning back in full-blast outpouring, facing a black female in flapper mini-dress and red stiletto heels; a snake is wound around her ankle as innocuous as jewelry as she plays the trombone. Cherries and bananas and other fruit litter the area like lush notes fallen to the floor.

If we're not sent to the flapper era, we get to go to some other period definitely not our own. Curling handlebar mustaches signal this in several works, especially entertainingly in "Acrobat." This was for an ad touting the graphic design sophistication of Tyler Smith Creative Direction -- quite a compliment for any illustrator chosen. The bald bruiser in the striped one-piece bathing suit is balancing on his hands on a chair, but making fun of the display of masculinity are his feminine legs arcing above. When not perched in high heels, in the Lisker world toes are often born to be en pointe.

Some of the paintings not restricted by assignments demonstrate her wider range. "Mixed Up" establishes a woman as a housewife as she leans on another female figure who has an electric mixing bowl beater for a head. Unlike anything else in the collection is "Bill's Shoes": simply 17 pairs of shoes in rows, the mundane objects almost voluptuous in their colorful and carefully individualized detail. In other paintings, dream-logic combinations accumulate into an associative punch. "Harlequin and Skeleton" has the latter (in memento mori silk stockings) proffering a peacock to the clown. The cigar of "Firecracker Sam" issues smoke forming a friendly demon head, and below a bulldog in a spiked collar has eyes that are sad to the point of mourning.

Several of Lisker's dark-background paintings are dark in mood as well. Some contain figures composed of disjointed mannequin parts and whose heads might be flower petals or a dunce cone. The most interesting of these -- as well as the most explicitly Hieronymous Bosch-inspired -- is "Fire Sprite," which combines a bikini-clad demoness above flames, a giant bird under an umbrella, and a grinning clown face on a stick.

The title cards make clear which of these paintings were done as illustrations, since the publications are specified. But we could use dates, to give us a sense of whether motifs and technical approaches spanned the output or belonged to a particular period. Lisker's technical mastery and compositional smarts are keen. Like any good graphic artist, she can alter her style and brush strokes to fit the assignment. Yet she manages to maintain a sensibility -- sometimes whimsical and sometimes with a grim reminder -- that we look for in all painters worth our attention.

Making art for art's sake

Like a good cook or a stand-up comic, Emily Lisker always leaves you clamoring for more. Only she does so visually, as an illustrator. You might recall her imaginative line drawings in this paper or color illustrations in such magazines as Mademoiselle or book covers such as Avi's Punch With Judy (and in that case, the pictures inside as well).

More is what you get in the large library gallery in Westerly, where Lisker is showing -- more than two dozen examples of her lively work through December 28. More is also a word that describes what the RISD-trained artist has sought from her successful career as an illustrator. She has always wanted to make paintings in their own right, rather than as work to satisfy art directors. So the Westerly show includes 13 "personal paintings," as she referred to them.

Lisker was in the gallery to talk about her increasing interest in making art for art's sake and how it emerged out of her work as an illustrator. She grew up outside New York City in a family that "more than encouraged" her crayon scrawling as a kid, she said. In fact, the way other families push children to become doctors or lawyers, hers wanted her and her four siblings to become artists.

That was hardly surprising, since her mother did some children's book illustrating and her father had a graphics studio and was an agent for a couple of illustrators. "So he would take me to meet them, and that was a pretty phenomenal experience. Sometimes I would write them letters if I saw their work and they would write me," Lisker recalled.

"Art was a big deal to my parents," she added.

Living in Larchmont, art museum trips were as natural as going to the zoo when she was little. So there was less of a difference to her between graphic design and high art than in most growing minds.

"The distinction was kind of blurry," Lisker said. "I know that I've always loved graphics. Living in Manhattan, you're bombarded with so much visual material there. Taking a train, and there are posters about the theater -- a super-visual charge."

Come 10th grade and an art teacher as enthusiastic as her parents took her to look over the Rhode Island School of Design, which impressed her. She entered there in 1981 -- but in the painting program

"I didn't want to be an illustrator," she said. "I saw a lot of the struggles that illustrators went through when they worked with my father, and I saw my mother struggling and said, `No way!' "

So Lisker, the only one of her brood to go into art professionally, took no illustration courses while at RISD. Not a one.

After school she tried this and that -- painting on furniture, silk-screening T-shirts. But she figured that if she continued, customers were always going to be instructing her about things like what colors they wanted. So starting in 1987 she took a deep breath and began trying to get illustration work, succeeding first with the Boston Globe and soon after with the Providence Journal and the NewPaper.

"That was very exciting to me, working for newspapers and magazines, because deadlines are short and forced me into trial by fire," Lisker said. When the New York Times calls, she noted, they usually want the finished drawing the same day.

It was good to get jobs, and it was creative, but there were restrictions. Not quite crayon-only-inside-the-outlines rules, but restrictions still the same.

Lisker stepped over to an editorial illustration she did seven years ago for the Atlantic Monthly, for an arts and leisure section that had advertising sponsorship. She titled it "Demon Dance," and it depicts a devilishly handsome man with a handlebar mustache holding a ballerina while dangling a bunch of grapes over her head. He is clean shaven but originally had a pointy beard.

"They said, `Great, but take the beard away, because our sponsor is going to think that beards are demonic,' " she said. "And I laughed so hard!"

She does all her color illustrations as paintings, sometimes quite large, that are photographed in large-negative format, so she knew that only the central image area would be used. As a little good-natured joke, she added a Satan mask outside the center and even a horned demon peeking from behind a curtain.

Lisker's commitment to doing more pure paintings began a couple of years ago when, "feeling boxed in" by her illustration, she began making daily entries into a sketchbook. The idea was to free up her imagination with a sort of spirit writing, using imagery instead of words, drawing "an improvised line, a line that is invented as you go." Most of the non-illustration works in the show are oil painting versions of this approach. They were done this year and can be identified by their inky blue backgrounds. She compares them to jazz improvisation, while illustrations are like playing in an orchestra. Lisker walked up to one titled "We're Not Going to the Party" and noted that it began with a dancing female figure with green flower petals on, or for, her face. Images of petals hold together a painting as random in its dream-like connections as a Hieronymous Bosch landscape; only instead of tormented creatures they range from an antic robot to a woman with a branch for one arm.

"It's dangerous. It's exciting and dangerous," Lisker said of the stream-of-consciousness approach. "It's sort of like bungee jumping." She laughed. " You don't know where you're going. You have no idea but you're committing as you go."

The next Emily Lisker retrospective will undoubtedly contain plenty more.

"I want to continue and see where this improvisation is going," she declared. "I'm curious because the sketchbook took me to a lot of things that I'm just beginning to apply."-- B.R.