The Vibrating Sky Artist Brian Portman has abstractions on his mind by Anne H. Roberts

There's a bank of images I pull from which is automatic, from the unconscious," Houston artist Brian Portman explained in a recent interview. "These images come from natural structures or biological forms but are not specificóthey're otherworldly, dreamlike." Portman's evocative work is being given a landmark one-man show which should prove fascinating for both longtime admirers and new audiences: Inscapes, Illuminated Passages by Brian Portman at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition and installation will be accompanied by a catalogue containing paintings from the past 10 years and an essay by curator Valerie Loupe Olsen. Although Portman speaks of his work as abstract surrealism, he explains, "Artists come to abstract painting by abstracting from something." He described his earliest painting in art school as figurative, with perhaps some association with his being gay. He abandoned the figure 15 years ago after a particularly cutting critique by a visiting artist.

Since the '90s, Portman begins his oil and acrylic paintings by laying in very bright color as underpainting. Many subsequent layers of dark brown and black glazes, often dripping down the surface, along with brushed-in areas, cover this bright primary color. He works and reworks the surface, adding and scraping away, finally introducing passages of sketchy light-hued pattern to complete the painting. Inspiration comes from nature, architecture, music, and literature. The artist sees dark color as mysterious and romantic, in no way depressive. He obscures his images by overpainting in order to force the viewer to spend more time looking at and into the works for meaning.

In Houston, an oil and enamel from 1998, one can pick out building shapes, squares of light paint resembling illuminated windows, lines forming streets and city blocks, chips of pale gray, blue, red, and orange surfacing through the dark brown swirls of smoggy overpainting. Houston is part of an interesting exhibition of seven paintings installed at the Penn Williamson & Company antique gallery through September. Portman's work and the gallery's 18th- and 19th-century Chinese furniture are remarkably complementary, the paintings' surface patterns resembling calligraphy in that context. Another beautiful and mysterious painting there, Darkened Hallway, from 1997, uses large circular dark painted strokes over a bright red grid with touches of darker reds and creams, obscured by a foggy center of black to dark green overpainting. Nights spent alone, imagined forms on the edges of dream are evoked by the painting. The overpainting creates a mysterious glow of light, seeming to come from within the surface of the painting.

In addition to six new paintings, a highlight of the Glassell exhibition will be an enormous (10' by 22') painting which will be suspended from the ceiling in a space formed by floating walls. When he spent a year in Rome, Portman became intrigued by how much time is spent looking up at art on ceilings and how that tension somewhat disorients the viewer and changes the way he sees the art. Another influence on this painting is the intensity of the sky in Portman's former Northeast home. "Twilight seems to last longer in the Northeast; the color of the sky becomes very intense, it vibrates." The huge new painting is called Suspended Solution and is a literary tribute to the title character in German writer Robert Musil's book Young Torless. In the book, Torless, an upperclass student at a military boarding school, spends an important moment lying on the ground looking at the night sky, contemplating his life and place in the universe. Portman hopes to give each viewer a similar opportunity with the installation.

Another highlight of the show will be an enormous collage drawing created directly on a museum wall. An image detail from a painting will be digitally reproduced many times and applied in a grid to the wall, over which Portman will draw additional pale images. Drawings, both on paper and canvas, have long been an important part of Portman's oeuvre, such as the large black-and-white paintings he exhibited in the late '80s at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery. At his exhibitions, he often mounts drawings from an ongoing sketchbook in an arbitrary grid layout on the wall. Repetition also appears in Circle Game, a large work on paper in a recent exhibition at Barbara Davis Gallery. The black, white, and gray piece contains many small circles of paper, collaged and overpainted, emphasizing an oval pattern in the center and adding texture. Loops stream out from the central form; Portman says he was thinking of solar flares jutting from the surface of the sun when he made the piece. The textured surface in this case is very dark, a paradox to the brightness of the sun.

Brian Portman is the first of the Glassell's former Core artists to be given a one-person exhibition at the museum. Begun in 1982, the highly competitive and prestigious Core Artists-in-Residence program selects 10 artists from applications across the country and abroad for the honor of an intensive studio experience. Portman, one of the earliest Core artists (1983-85), was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and has an art degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, but has made his home in Houston since his residency here. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1989 and the Dallas Museum of Art Anne Giles Kimbrough Grant in 1988. Houston is indeed fortunate that this talented artist has chosen the city as his home and that we have an opportunity to see this important museum exhibition firsthand.

Inscapes, Illuminated Passages by Brian Portman will open Thursday, Sept. 14, 5:30-7:30 p.m., and run Sept. 14-Nov. 26 at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 5101 Montrose Blvd., 713/639-7500. You can also see Portman's paintings at Barbara Davis Gallery, 2627 Colquitt, and at Penn Williamson & Company antique gallery, 3331 D'Amico, 713/520-9670.

Anne H. Roberts is a Houston writer/photographer.